What Obama told Philly donors today

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Here's the White House Press Office's transcript, unedited:

Hyatt at the Bellevue

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

5:25 P.M. EDT, 6/30/11





THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Philly! (Applause.) Thank you. Thank you, Philadelphia! (Applause.) It is good to be back -- (applause) -- good to be back in the great state of Pennsylvania. (Applause.) Congratulations, Phillies fans. (Applause.) That is quite a rotation.

There are a couple of people I want to acknowledge. First of all, you just heard from somebody who I consider just a dear, dear friend. This is a guy who stood with me when nobody was sure whether I was going to win or not. And he didn't have to do it, but he was just a terrific, terrific supporter, a great friend. He is a great senator. Please give it up for Bob Casey. (Applause.)

Two other outstanding members of your congressional delegation who have been with me and supportive of everything we've been trying to do -- I could not be prouder of the work they do on behalf of their constituents -- Congressman Brady and Congressman Fattah are here. (Applause.) Thank you.

Your outstanding mayor, Mayor Nutter is in the house. (Applause.) And one of the great legislators in Congress who also happens to be a pretty good political mind, and that is why we are so proud to have her as the chairwoman of the DNC -- Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Please give her a big round of applause. (Applause.)

Now, I see a lot of new faces out here. And then I see a few faces I've known for a long time. (Applause.) Some of you who are here knew me before I had gray hair. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You're looking good, though! (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you. (Laughter.) Malia and Sasha say that it makes me look distinguished. (Laughter.) Michelle says it just makes me look old. (Laughter.) No, she loves me, but she just says it makes me look old. (Laughter.)

Now, being here with all of you, I can't help but think back to the election two and a half years ago, and that night in Grant Park. It was the culmination of an extraordinary campaign that drew on the hard work and the support of people all across America. Men and women -- and some children -- I did very well with the eight and under demographic. (Laughter.) Men and women who believed that change was possible, who believed that we didn't have to accept politics as usual, who believed that we could have a country that once again lived up to its finest ideals and its highest aspirations. And it was a beautiful night. Everybody was feeling pretty good.

But what I said that night -- some of you remember this -- I said this is not the end; this is just the beginning; that the road we were on was going to be difficult, that the climb was going to be steep. We didn't know how steep it was going to be. We didn't realize the magnitude of the recession we were facing and the financial crisis. We didn't realize we had already lost 4 million jobs by the time I was sworn in. But we knew it was going to be tough.

And that was okay -- because I did not run for President to do easy things. I ran for President to do hard things. (Applause.) I ran for President because it was time to do big things. (Applause.) That we couldn't keep kicking the can down the road anymore, too much was at stake, and that we had to get started tackling the tough issues that families face each and every day. Even if it would take time -- (audience disruption.)

THE PRESIDENT: So -- listen --

AUDIENCE: We love you!

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, guys. (Applause.) Now, let me tell you why I thought it was so important to run -- even though Michelle, she wasn't so sure. (Laughter.) And why you guys got involved. I just want everybody to remember. We ran because we believed in an economy that didn't just work for those at the top, but worked for everybody -- where prosperity was shared, from the machinist on the line, to the manager on the floor, to the CEO in the boardroom.

We ran because we believed our success isn't just determined by stock prices and corporate profits, but by whether ordinary folks can find a good job that pays for a middle-class life -- where they can pay the mortgage, and take care of their kids, and send their kids to college, and save for retirement, and maybe have a little left over to go to a movie and go to dinner once in a while. (Laughter and applause.)

We ran because for a decade, wages and incomes had flatlined, and costs kept on going up for everybody even though they didn't have any more income. That was before the economic crisis hit. And obviously once the economic crisis did hit, we had to take a series of emergency steps to save this economy from collapse -- not because we wanted to help banks or make sure that the auto companies' CEOs were making good bonuses, but we did it because we wanted to make sure that families who needed help could still take out a loan to buy a house or start a new business. We wanted to make sure that the millions of people who depended on the auto industry, that they would still have jobs.

And so some of those decisions were tough. And you remember, we got criticized a lot. But you take a look at what's happened. Some folks didn't want us getting involved in the auto industry -- I didn't expect to be the CEO of a car company when I ran for President. (Laughter.) But as a consequence of what we did, we saved jobs. We saved American manufacturing. (Applause.) We cut taxes for middle-class families. We ended subsidies to the banks for student loans, to make college more affordable. (Applause.) We made sure -- that's why I signed a bill to make sure there was equal pay for equal work, because I've got two daughters and I want to make sure they're treated just the same as the boys are. (Applause.) That's why we're promoting manufacturing and homegrown American energy -- because that's what will lead to jobs that pay a decent salary. I want the wind turbines and the solar panels and the electric cars to be built right here in America. (Applause.)

That's why, with the help of these outstanding members of Congress, we're standing up a new consumer bureau with just one responsibility: looking out for ordinary people in the financial system so folks aren't cheated. Whether you're getting a credit card or getting a mortgage, you need to know that you're getting a fair deal. (Applause.)

And that's why we passed health reform, so that nobody in the richest nation on Earth goes bankrupt when they get sick. (Applause.)

We also had a long campaign in 2008 because we believed it was time to end the war in Iraq. And that's what we're doing. We've removed 100,000 troops from Iraq. We've ended combat missions. We are on track to remove the rest of the troops, bring them home by the end of this year. (Applause.)

I ran for President because I believed we needed to refocus our efforts and our energy in Afghanistan and going after al Qaeda. And we are going after al Qaeda and we've taken out their leadership. (Applause.) And because of our progress and the extraordinary sacrifices of our troops, we are fulfilling the commitment I made at the start to reduce our troops, starting this month, so that Afghans can start taking responsibility for their own security -- (applause) -- and we can start rebuilding right here at home. (Applause.) It's time to start rebuilding here at home -- time for nation-building right here.

We live in a world where America is facing stiff competition for good jobs from rapidly growing nations, like China and India and Brazil. For a long time we were told the best way to win that competition is just to undermine consumer protections and undermine clean air laws and clean water laws and hand out tax breaks to millionaires and billionaires. That was the idea that held sway for close to a decade. And let's face it, it didn't work out very well.

In fact, if you look at our history, you'll see that philosophy has never worked out very well -- where people are just asking, "What's in it for me?" America was built on the hard work and ingenuity of our people and our businesses. But we also set up a free system of public schools and a generation was sent to college on the G.I. Bill. (Applause.) And we constructed roads and highways that spanned a continent. And through investments and research and technology, we sent a man to the moon. And we discovered lifesaving medicine. And we launched the information age and created the Internet and created millions of jobs along the way. (Applause.) That's how you build a strong nation. That's how you build a strong middle class -- by making the investments that are needed and always looking out over the horizon. (Applause.)

So we believe in business and we believe in free markets. But we also believe in making sure that every kid in this country has a chance. (Applause.) And we believe that our seniors deserve to retire with dignity and respect and have some semblance of security. (Applause.) And we believe in making investments in science and technology. (Applause.) And we believe in having the best infrastructure in the world. And so the same things that worked for us in the past, that's what we need to be doing today.

There's an important debate in Washington right now about how to cut the deficit. And let me say it is absolutely critical that we get a handle on our finances. We've spent a lot of money that we don't have. And we've made a lot of commitments that are going to be hard to keep if we do nothing. And like families all across America, government has to live within its means.

So I'm prepared to bring our deficit down by trillions of dollars. That's with a "t" -- trillions. (Laughter.) But I will not reduce our deficit by sacrificing our kids' education. (Applause.) I'm not going to reduce our deficit by eliminating medical research being done by our scientists. (Applause.) I won't sacrifice rebuilding our roads and our bridges and our railways and our airports -- I want Philadelphia to have the best, not the worst.

Not just roads and bridges and sewer mains and water systems; I want us to have the best broadband -- (applause) -- the best electric grid. I'm not going to sacrifice clean energy at a time when our dependence on foreign oil is causing so many Americans pain at the pump. (Applause.) That's sacrificing America's future.

And that's what I want to say to all of you, Philadelphia. There's more than one way to mortgage our future. It would be irresponsible, we would be mortgaging our future, if we don't do anything about the deficit. But we will also be mortgaging our future and it will be irresponsible if, in the process of reducing our deficit, we sacrifice those very things that allow us to grow and create jobs and succeed and compete in the future.

What makes America great is not just the height of our skyscrapers or the might of our military or the size of our GDP. What makes us great is the character of our people. (Applause.) And we are rugged individualists -- that's part of what makes us American; we like to make up our own minds and we don't like other people to tell us what to do. But what also makes us who we are is our faith in the future and our recognition that our future is shared.

It's the belief I am my brother's keeper and my sister's keeper; that my life is richer and our country is stronger when everybody participates and everybody has a measure of security and everybody has got a fair shot at the American Dream. (Applause.) That's our vision for America. Not a vision of a small America, but a vision of a big America and a compassionate America and an optimistic America, and a bold America. And that's what we're fighting for. (Applause.)

And the good news is that America is possible -- an America where we're living within our means, but we're still investing in the future. That's possible. Where everybody is making sacrifices, but nobody bears all the burden by themselves. The idea that no matter what we look like or who we are, no matter whether our ancestors came from Ellis Island or on a slave ship, or across the Rio Grande, that we are all connected to one another, and that we rise and fall together. (Applause.)

That's the idea at the heart of America. That's the idea at the heart of our last campaign. That's the idea at the heart of this campaign. That's why I'm going to need your help more than ever. (Applause.)

This campaign is at its early stages. I've got a day job. I've got other things to do. (Laughter.) But while I'm working, there are going to be candidates parading around the country. (Laughter and applause.) And they're going to do what they do, which is they're going to attack -- here in Philadelphia, they're going to attack. They won't have a plan -- (laughter) -- but they will attack. And I understand that; that's politics as we've come to know it.

But what I also understand is, is the American people are a lot less interested in us attacking each other; they're more interested in us attacking the country's problems. (Applause.) They're less interested in hearing us exchange insults about the past; they want us to exchange ideas about the future. (Applause.) That's the contest I'm looking forward to, because I know that's the contest that America needs. And by the way, that's the contest that we will win. (Applause.)

And, Philadelphia, I know there are some of you who are frustrated because we haven't gotten everything done that we said we were going to do in two and a half years. It's only been two and a half years. I got five and a half years more to go. (Applause.) And there are -- look, there are times where I feel frustrated. But we knew this wasn't going to be easy. We knew a journey like this one, there were going to be setbacks, like there were setbacks during the first campaign. There are going to be times where we stumble, just we stumbled sometimes during the first campaign.

But we also knew that at each and every juncture in our history when our future was on the line -- (audience interruption.)

AUDIENCE: Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama! Obama! (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: What we also knew was that whenever the country has been at a crossroads, we've always come together to keep the American Dream alive for the next generation. And now is the time for us to do it again. Now is the time to finish what we started and keep the dream alive.

And I just to want to remind everybody here, this campaign is not about me. It's about us. (Applause.) It's about students who are working their way through college, workers heading to factories to build American cars again, small business owners testing new ideas, construction crews laying down roads, families who faced hardship and setbacks but who haven't stopped believing in this country, and who believe that we can emerge from this challenge stronger than before.

That's the story of progress in America -- the stubborn refusal to accept anything less than the best that this country can be. And with your help, if you're willing to keep fighting with me, if you're willing to knock on doors with me, if you are going to get as much energy going as you got in 2008, then together we are going to write another chapter in that story and leave a new generation a brighter future.

God bless you, Philadelphia. God bless you, Pennsylvania. Yes, we can. May God bless you, and God bless America. (Applause.)





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Observations On The Day

Paul Craig Roberts at OpEd News, 6/30/11:




Americans are a doomed people for many reasons. One reason is that they are disunited and at one another's throats and, thus, cannot stand up the tyranny issuing from Washington.

For example, the governments of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, states that share borders, have been fighting for more than two decades over the water in Georgia's Lake Lanier, located a few miles northeast of Atlanta. In 2009 a federal district judge ruled that it is illegal for water to be drawn from the lake to meet the needs of Atlanta's three million residents. The judge stipulated that the three states had until July 2011 to reach an agreement, failing which Atlanta would be restricted to the amount of water it received in the mid-1970s, when its population was less than one-third of its present size.

Obviously, the ruling was a major incentive to Alabama and Florida not to compromise. Either the judge gave no thought to this fact or he was unconcerned that 3 million Atlantans would find themselves in drought circumstances.

At the last moment on June 28, with two days to go before Atlanta was cut off from its water supply, a federal appeals court ruled that the district court judge's decision was incorrect and gave the US Corps of Engineers one year to make a final decision concerning the allocation of Lake Lanier's water to the three states.

The state of Alabama, displaying total callousness to its 3 million fellow American citizens in Atlanta, has announced that it is appealing the ruling, and Florida is "studying the ruling," no doubt looking for a way to get Atlanta's share of the water.

Quite clearly, this is not a United States. Even the old Confederacy cannot stand together. For more than two decades the three states have not sat down to make a fair deal. Instead, they have been suing in federal courts, each seeking advantage.

In California, water is being attacked from a different direction. Rich corporate and financial interests realized that control over water was control over life -- the ultimate power. These powerful few are moving to deregulate and privatize California's water supply in order to exploit their control over the life-sustaining substance. California's dry spell has been hyped into a cataclysmic crisis that pits small farmers against urban environmentalists. This is theater to distract a gullible public and media from the fact that privatized water can be turned into paper water, for which derivatives can be created and speculation can ensue. "Privatized water" has nothing whatsoever to do with providing water to mere people. Its purpose is to provide billions of dollars to financial interests.

Speaking of paper profits, today the stock market was up on the news that the "democratic" Greek government, despite the overwhelming opposition of the Greek people, agreed to the imposed austerity measures in order to borrow from the European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund, both being illegal loans under the two organizations' charters, the money to pay private foreign banks that bought Greek government bonds. The private banks are being fully compensated for not doing due diligence.

The financial markets, in their utter stupidity, think -- if that is an appropriate word -- that it is good news the Greek government has agreed to drive the Greek economy deeper into recession in order to acquire more loans with which to pay off loans that it cannot pay off.
The financial press thinks that the austerity measures that the Greek government has to accept and the sell-off of the public domain -- water companies, ports, a string of Greek Islands, the state telephone monopoly, the state lottery and the reduction in pay, employment, and social services -- somehow makes the Greek economy more capable of producing the income needed to service the new IMF and ECB loans that pay off the private German, French and Dutch bankers.

If Wall Street and the financial sector had an IQ as high as 100, they would know -- every one of them -- that the "bailout" is pushing Greece deeper into a hole, and that Greek's ability to pay will decline.

Why doesn't the Greek government know what is completely obvious when the people in the streets protesting are fully aware of the fact? The only answer to this question is that the Greek politicians have been bought by the debtor banks. Greek "democracy" serves the debtor private banks, not the Greek people.

The vaunted financial markets are not rational. Indeed, they are the opposite. Financial markets turn obvious bad news into good news in order to drive up prices of financial assets. Truth and facts mean nothing whatsoever to financial markets. The financial markets are based on lies, illusions, and delusions that drive up asset prices. That is what you are investing in when you invest in Wall Street.

In the US today we have president obama challenging congress on the "default crisis." The american president (lower case is used to indicate the insubstantiality of american political institutions, including that of the country itself) who refuses to obey the War Powers Act which requires that he communicate with congress before he takes america to war, told congress that the entire cost of deficit reduction cannot be put on the backs of america's poor unless he has the cover of taking away a few special interest tax breaks. Obama is telling the nitwits who, like himself, are bought-and-paid-for by the interests, that to continue the game the rich corporations have to give up something, like a few insignificant tax breaks. If the congressional idiots catch on, then obama can emphasize how he is making the rich pay, while he covertly shifts the burden to the poor and to the remnants of the american middle class, a destroyed entity.

The entire default "confrontation" between "america's first black president" and congress is fraudulent. If attacking Libya is so much in the national interest that obama doesn't need to inform congress, it is completely obvious that it is too much in the national interest that the US government not default.

The US default on its bonds would not only wreck the international financial system, it would destroy american power. Nothing is more in "the national interest" than Washington not defaulting. Therefore, it is completely obvious that if congress does not raise the debt ceiling, the Federal Reserve will continue to purchase the Treasury's debt issues so that the government can pay its bills. The Bush regime, with its Federalist Society brownshirts, established once and for all that the american president becomes Caesar during war and that it is the president's prerogative alone to declare what is in the national interest. Congress has become unnecessary, like the Roman senate under the Caesars.

There is no chance whatsoever of the US government defaulting. Yet, the "default crisis" is the main story purveyed by the US Ministry of Propaganda.

On the environmental front, more devastation awaits america. This is not about the nuclear radiation dangers from the floods, no matter how real. It is more simple. The US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has also been "privatized" and has become a government servant of private interests.

The BLM has been "privatized" in the sense that those who actually cared about the purpose of the law and the preservation of public lands have been displaced by new appointees put in power by the Clinton and the Bush regimes. Yes, you guessed correctly, the BLM's management consists of corporate appointees, who are doing what they were put there to do, which is to steal the public domain for private profit.

For equines or horse lovers, this is turning out to be a hard blow. According to Marilyn Wargo, who is knowledgeable on this issue, the BLM is about to exterminate two-thirds of the remaining wild horse herds that exist on the pubic's lands in Nevada, Wyoming, Oregon and Colorado.

Like everything else in our "freedom and democracy" country, this extermination is being done despite powerful public protests by citizens -- citizens most likely characterized by Homeland Security as "animal rights terrorists."

Who stands to gain? Obviously, cattle and sheep corporations that take over the grazing rights from wildlife. Americans have still not understood that one accomplishment of the Bush Regime was to put government agencies that were created to protect the public domain into the hands of corporate interests. The fusion of corporate and government interests in the US today is more complete than in Fascist Italy.

There is no freedom, no democracy, and no government accountability in Amerika, a fascist state.





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Taking on Big Coal’s Curriculum

Adam Sanchez at Common Dreams, 6/29/11:

For years dirty energy corporations have created education materials marketed to young children in an attempt to shape the discussion around environmental issues. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon created a lesson plan “about the healthy, flourishing wildlife in Prince William Sound, Alaska, which showed beautiful eagles, frolicking sea otters, and sea birds in their habitat.” Last year, oil giant BP was exposed for helping to write California state’s environmental curriculum for over six million children. So it should come as no surprise that Scholastic recently partnered with the American Coal Foundation to produce “The United States of Energy,” a 4th grade curriculum designed to boost the “clean” image of dirty coal.

Scholastic, a $2 billion corporation whose educational materials are in 9 out of 10 classrooms in the United States, is no stranger to partnering with the corporate world to market products and brands to children. Last year Scholastic teamed up with SunnyD, the juice company whose product has been labeled by consumer groups as “junk juice” because of its high sugar and very low fruit juice content despite being marketed as a “real fruit beverage.” Marketing the campaign through their Parent & Child magazine, Scholastic agreed to donate 20 books to any class that sent in 20 UPC labels of SunnyD drinks. The ten schools that collected the most labels (ranging from 13,000 to 30,000 SunnyD labels per school!) were awarded hundreds of books.

Scholastic has also partnered with Shell Oil Company to create science lessons that explore “energy conservation and practical ‘green’ solutions,” which help focus students on their own individual “carbon footprint” while conveniently ignoring Shell’s much larger one. Scholastic’s “Shedding Light on Energy” teacher’s guide that is still promoted on their website (along with the Shell curriculum) was written by the Chamber of Commerce, whose unwavering climate change denial was too much for even Apple, the company named the biggest polluter in the technology industry by Greenpeace. Other previous Scholastic clients have included McDonald’s, Cartoon Network, Nestle and Disney.

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'Anarchists' create overnight havoc

Seattle Post Intelligencer, June 26, 2011:

Several hundred anarchists swarmed through the Capitol Hill area overnight, noisily vandalizing stores and smashing windows before dispersing into the darkness.

Police say the drama began shortly after midnight Sunday when a flash mob gathered, passing out flyers, during a dance party. But the mob soon went out of control, creating havoc, said Renee Witt of the Seattle Police Department.

The anarchists marched down 12th Avenue and Broadway, yelling and chanting. Some carried rainbow flags, while others carried red-and-black flags and wore masks.

Eventually some people started smashing store windows, damaging property, spray-painting slogans and bashing in the windshield of a patrol car.

During the melee, a bank ATM also was damaged. Windows were smashed and spray-painted at an American Apparel store and at a luxury car dealership.

Officers swooped in, arming themselves with gas masks and riot gear. At least one person was arrested, Witt said. Witnesses said police used a Taser on one woman.

After a while, the mob dispersed as quickly as it appeared.

Police say the mob action did not appear to be directly connected to gay pride festivities taking place in the area.

But a rambling post on the anarchists' website said the idea of the flash mob was to protest the assimilation of gay pride into the commercial mainstream.

Read more: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Anarchists-create-overnight-havoc-on-Capitol-1440982.php#ixzz1Qi7SHVfZ

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We've Almost Lost Nebraska

HARVEY WASSERMAN at CounterPunch, 6/29/11:

As Fukushima Spews, Los Alamos Burns and Vermont Rages ...

Humankind is now threatened by the simultaneous implosion, explosion, incineration, courtroom contempt and drowning of its most lethal industry.

We know only two things for certain: worse is yet to come, and those in charge are lying about it---at least to the extent of what they actually know, which is nowhere near enough.

Indeed, the assurances from the nuke power industry continue to flow like the floodwaters now swamping the Missouri Valley heartland.

But major breakthroughs have come from a Pennsylvania Senator and New York's Governor on issues of evacuation and shut-down. And a public wassermancampaign for an end to loan guarantees could put an end to the US industry once and for all.

FUKUSHIMA: The bad news continues to bleed from Japan with no end in sight. The "light at the end of the tunnel" is an out-of-control radioactive freight train, headed to the core of an endangered planet.

Widespread internal radioactive contamination among Japanese citizens around Fukushima has now been confirmed. Two whales caught some 650 kilometers from the melting reactors have shown intense radiation.

Plutonium, the deadliest substance known to our species, has been found dangerously far from the site.

Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government have admitted to three 100% meltdowns but can't confirm with any reliability the current state of those cores. There's reason to believe one or more have progressed to "melt-throughs" in which they burn through the thick stainless steel pressure vessel and onto the containment floor.

The molten cores may be covered with water. But whether they can melt further through the containments and into the ground remains unclear.

Possibilities may include a "China Syndrome" scenario in which one or more still-molten cores does melt through the containment and hits ground water. That could lead to a steam explosion that could blow still larger clouds of radioactive steam, water and debris into the atmosphere and ocean.

At least three explosions have occurred, one of which may have involved criticality.

There is no doubt at least two containments were breached very early in the disaster. Unit Four is cracked and sinking. The status of its used radioactive fuel pool, which has clearly caught fire, is uncertain. Also unclear is the ability of the owners to sustain the stability of Units Five and Six, which were shut when the quake/tsunami hit.

That stability depends on continued power to run cooling systems, which could disappear amidst seismic aftershocks many believe are inevitable. A very substantial quake hit after the tremors that led to Indonesia's devastating tsunami, and few doubt it could happen again---soon---at Fukushima.

All the above is dependent on reports controlled primarily by Tokyo Electric and the Japanese government. There is every reason to believe the situation is worse than it seems, and that those in charge don't really know the full of the extent of the damage or how to cope with it.

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NEBRASKA: The flooding Missouri River continues to threaten at least two heartland reactors.

Late reports indicate Cooper may still be running, with public assurances it could be shut very quickly. What might happen if the operators are a little bit late has not been explained.

Nor is there much to go on about the impacts of flooded cores and fuel cooling ponds on the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers or the eco-systems along the way to a Gulf of Mexico still reeling from BP's toxic dose.

But an almost surreal set of circumstances surrounds the true nature of design specifications and protections in place (or not) at Ft. Calhoun.

They may be best summarized by what happened to a "flood berm" meant to protect Ft. Calhoun. This huge rubberized water-filled sausage was sixteen feet at the base and eight feet high.

But CNN has quoted a company representative as saying a some sort of equipment "came in contact" with the berm and punctured it.

Not to worry: the "same level of protection is in place" as had been prior to the installation of the berm.

In other words, the device was installed to protect the reactor. Then somebody punctured it. But things are as they were before so they must not have needed that berm in the first place. Got it?

It's as yet unclear whether flood waters will continue to rise at these two reactors, whether the operators can protect them, and what will happen if they can't.

The corporate media is carrying virtually zero coverage of any of the above stories. All are subject to rapid, dangerous changes about which we may have little reliable information.

But we do know for sure that US Senator Robert Casey, Jr. (D-PA) now wants to see more deeply into one of the key holes in the nuclear façade: evacuation.

After Three Mile Island's 1979 partial melt-down, new federal legislation allegedly gave states more power over how to get people out of the path of a melting nuke.

But after an as-yet unopened Perry reactor was damaged by a 1986 earthquake, Ohio's then-Governor Richard Celeste sued to keep Perry shut pending a state evacuation study.

The NRC refused and won in federal court. Perry opened. Ohio's official study then said evacuation was virtually impossible.

A quarter-century later, Casey wants to see what it might now take to move downwinders out of harm's way from a TMI, Perry, Chernobyl, Fukushima, Vermont Yankee, Cooper, Ft. Calhoun…..you name it.

Casey's being joined by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose demands for the shut-down of Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, have left its owners "shaken."

Cuomo and Casey might do well to join governors of states like Vermont, Massachusetts, California and others in testing the law on evacuation planning. Populations have vastly increased at virtually all US reactor sites since TMI. And the ugly realities that define the so-called "Peaceful Atom" are still making themselves all too apparent.

Whether the US will now turn with Germany, Japan, Italy, Switzerland, Israel and others away from atomic power and toward a green-powered Earth is up to us. The Solartopian technologies of wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, bio-fuels, increased efficiency and conservation are now demonstrably cheaper, safer, cleaner, more reliable, more job-producing and quicker to install than anything atomic energy can promise.

A $36 billion loan guarantee give-away still mars the proposed 2012 federal budget. Constant pressure on Congress and the White House can kill that, and any other proposed funding for still more of these nightmares.

The stream of reactor disasters spewing from this dying industry is certain to escalate. The toll rises with each leak at Fukushima, every flame at Los Alamos, each legal brief at Vermont Yankee, every foot of Nebraska floodwater.

The need to stop the madness grows more desperate every day.




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Mob of teens assault and rob Center City patrons

Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/29/11:



The two young women were sitting at a window table inside the Max Brenner restaurant on 15th Street, near Walnut, sharing chocolate fondue after some shopping.

The streets were vibrant. The weather was nice.

"The city had a good vibe," remembered one of the women, Maria, who requested her full name not be printed.

But their night on the town was about to become frightening.

Heading their way was a pack of teens roving through Center City after leaving a North Philadelphia music festival.

They were part of about 100 or more young people who had left Saturday night's event, police said, committing a series of violent assaults and robberies, including one against Maria, 25, of North Philadelphia, and her cousin Cecilia, 29, of Havertown.

Donta Holdclaw was in the crowd of teens that night. On Tuesday afternoon, he stood on the front step of his mother's North Philadelphia apartment and said the group was bound for South Street.

"They were holding fireworks," he said. "That's what we were going to see."

He had gone to the Susquehanna Community Festival, along Susquehanna Avenue near Broad Street, with his older brother, Aleek Hamilton, 19. Last week, Hamilton graduated from Mastbaum Vocational/Technical High School, with plans to attend college and become a mechanic, said his mother, Letitia Washington.

Hamilton is now in jail, charged with robbing Cecilia.

Erica Rockymore, 18, of North Philadelphia, was also among the teens, police said. Last week, she graduated from the Philadelphia Electrical and Technology Charter High School, her family said. Her 14-year-old sister asked her to take her to the festival. Rockymore is in jail, too, charged with assaulting Maria.

Maria and Cecilia were enjoying their dessert at Max Brenner, with its large, open bay doors. Afterward, Maria, an interior and industrial designer, had planned to visit a Northern Liberties art exhibit. Cecilia was heading home.

The women had spent the afternoon dress shopping. Maria is getting married soon.

About 10 p.m., Maria said, she saw a shirtless teenager run past the restaurant.

"He was running in the middle of the street and looked like he was running away from someone," she said.

Maria tucked away her phone and wallet, which had been sitting on the table.

She grew up in Brazil, she said, and was more street-smart than her cousin.

Before she could tell Cecilia to put her cell phone away, another teen reached through the window and snatched it.

Maria ran out after him.

She was on the sidewalk, starting to scream "thief," she said, when someone from behind punched her in the jaw.

She said she turned, jaw throbbing, to see the girl who had hit her standing with five other teens. "What are you going to do?" she said the girl who had punched her yelled.

The teens were laughing, she said. "They were fearless. It seemed like they weren't taking anything serious."

Maria ran into another restaurant and called 911.

The girls in the group called her a slut as they left, she said.

The police arrived quickly. Another customer at Max Brenner, a 32-year-old woman from Delaware who was with her 7-year-old daughter, had also been robbed. Someone had reached in through a window and snatched her phone, according to police reports.

[...]



.

Mugged then Shot

As published at OpEd News, Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Intrepid Report and Le Grand Soir, 6/29/11:

“The United States has been a leader in the multinational effort to end bribery and corruption in international business practices.”—Website of The U.S. State Department

If absolute power corrupts absolutely, why shouldn’t the United States be the most corrupt (and corrupting) country on earth? We’re number one! In America, each politician can be bought and absurd sums of money are routinely misallocated or missing altogether, with nary a peep from the complicit media. On the foreign front, America’s modus operandi is to bribe every dictator, and the ones she can’t bribe, she’ll undermine, overthrow or bomb back to Jesus. In exchange for this bribe, which can be disguised as loans or “foreign assistance,” said dictator will allow America to loot his country in perpetuity. If you don’t believe me, just strip any tinpot dictator and you’ll surely find “CIA” tattooed on one ass cheek, with a (pretty good) portrait of a recent U.S. president embossed on the other. Lovers always leave a mark, they often say. Sometimes it’s not a dictator, per se, but a dominant party that’s America’s hushed puppy. In any case, rapacious trade deals and unpayable loans are the bane of countless client states orbiting Washington.

Domestically, American corruption has been institutionalized as campaign contributions and lobbying, but that’s only the open, legal part. Perhaps these practices are allowed to trick us into thinking that American corruption only goes so far, but who really knows what goes on in the labyrinthine backrooms, basements and dungeons of Washington? In any case, us lumpen Americans are “represented” by millionaire politicians who are lint deep in the pockets of the fattest banks and corporations. The American politician is thoroughly corrupt, often from grassroots level, but the degree of venality and sanctimonious hypocrisy increase as he approaches Washington DC, that beautiful cesspool of martial madness.

No candidate who’s not heavily pro big business, overtly or covertly, can have any chance of being elected to national office. He won’t be funded, nor will he be seen on television. It’s not a democracy when all candidates are vetted beforehand, and only millionaires can be chosen by other millionaires and billionaires. In this setup, the average citizen doesn’t matter, as his vote or canvassing for a favorite are only charades designed to make him feel good and involved, as if his opinions and advocacy matter, but whatever he does, it won’t prevent the election of yet another tool who’s corrupt, pro war and pro big business, at the expense of all else. But don’t despair, all you earnest partisans, for even when your candidate does lose, you'll still get the same deal, more or less. Those who voted for McCain, for example, got pretty much all of his policies through Obama, so it’s a win, win, lose, lose situation, see? Emblematic of this farce is the fact that American tax payers are even asked to contribute three bucks a year to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. Though stuffed with cash from Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Raytheon, etc., our candidates still panhandle from poor schmucks whom they will soon rip off anyway.

American politicians may differ on personal and ethical matters such as school prayer, gay marriage and abortion, but on all the major, lucrative issues affecting the military industrial complex or big business, they are remarkably uniform. Our senators and congressmen also behave like trained seals when it comes to Israel. Witness the 29 standing ovations a packed House gave Netanyahu recently. Whether Democrat or Republican, each was terrified to be caught sitting as his colleagues jumped up and barked.

Your rep sure knows who his daddy is, and it ain’t you, sucker! The primary job of the American politician, from Obama on down, is to spin and disguise an endless series of corporate and military crimes he’s enabling. Which brings us to the Pentagon. No other governmental organ is more gluttonously corrupt. The Pentagon’s main function is not defending America but to bleed this country dry to enrich Halliburton, Lockheed/Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and the rest. Over and over again, the Pentagon has put hundreds of thousands of Americans in harm’s way, just so its masters can make a handsome profit. To feed these insatiable ogres, the Pentagon is willing to destroy American itself, and it is doing so, right now.

Beside bloody business as usual, billions of dollars often go missing from the Pentagon cash register without any explanation whatsoever, and in 2001, Donald Rumsfeld even admitted that $2.3 trillion had disappeared, which he blamed on sloppy accounting. So it’s not thievery or corruption, but merely inept arithmetic. Tamping down this scandal, the mainstream media seemed to agree.

But perhaps we do have a math problem. We are a people who clip 25 cent coupons, drive (an SUV) a mile to save a buck, register with subtle satisfaction the missing penny from a $19.99 price tag, yet these stolen trillions leave us unfazed. One reason for this, I think, is that American corruption is not experienced directly, face to face, as it is in many other countries. Most Americans have never been browbeaten and shaken down by a corrupt cop, clerk or judge, so we can pretend that corruption doesn’t hurt us. Washington has also been waging wars without raising taxes, so it’s no skin off my back, many Americans are thinking, but our bellicose policy overseas is certainly bankrupting the homeland, even as it increases our insecurity in future blowbacks. The constant hike in our money supply, devaluing our dollars, is also a form of hidden taxation.

Another reason for our passivity in the face of widespread corruption is the state of our media, which routinely hype trivial stories while suppressing much greater outrages. Thus, the money John Edwards spent on his mistress, a million dollars provided by two private donors, was discussed for a week by television and newspaper “pundits,” but no one is concerned about the $1.5 million of tax money wasted each time Washington fires a Tomahawk missile at Libya. How many thousands have been launched so far in this three-month war? No one knows, and no one seems to care about the real flesh and bones on the receiving end of those weapons. “Bad guys” deserve to die, and so do “collateral damages.” Even as they mug us, our masters speak to us as if we’re morons. As they gobble up the entire world and everyone’s future, we get to nibble on catch phrases and slogans

Like Pavlov’s dogs, Americans have been conditioned to salivate at the sound of a home run, a Lady Gaga’s burp and the promise of hope and change comes election time, but when that fat, familiar hand reaches into our wallet, yet again, we feel nothing. We’re cool and blasé until it’s our turn to receive the pink slip, be evicted, then having to curl up in our car or on cardboard.

Interviewed by Stud Terkels, retired congressman C. Wright Patman said in 1970, “A dictatorship could spring up here over night, if this country got so bad. If another Depression came, we’d have a revolution. People wouldn’t take it any more. They have more knowledge. The big ones, they’d be looking for somebody that’d have the power to just kill people, if they didn’t agree. When John Doe begins to get up, they’d just go down and shoot him.”

I’m not sure that we have more knowledge, but with a presidency that can wage wars without congress or popular approval, and that can imprison or kill any American citizen without due process, a dictatorship is certainly here. Ditto, that Depression.

In a productive economy, corruption is less glaring because there are so many legitimate ways to enrich oneself, but in an increasingly non-productive one, such as what we have now, corruption becomes the primary means to riches. As we starve and kill each other, the mega corporations and their servants, our politicians, will continue to fatten themselves through their access to power.

In a ghetto with no stores, only drug corners, any bling-bling dude steering a loud Hummer is viewed suspiciously (or with admiration), so in this nation of fewer and fewer factories, save those that make bombs, tanks and high-grade weapons, who are our biggest death pushers and pimps, and what should we do about them?







.

Ft Calhoun Newest Photos Have Disappeared

Dr. Tom Burnett, 6-27-11:

MSNBC apparently had a picture of the Ft. Calhoun nuclear plant taken today AFTER the 'water dam' - barely visible surrounding the reactor and main control buildings in this photo taken on June 24 - burst. But that page is now 'page not found'.

I'll guess that when the aqua dam burst, the control room was flooded. They are saying "no problem, there is no danger"- but, of course, there IS a problem.

The REASON there is a problem and why they aren't telling the truth is because, while Fukishima is equivalent to about twenty Chernobyls, Ft. Calhoun is equivalent to about twenty Fukushimas.

Not because it has a lot of reactors - or even a very big one. But because it is holding an immense amount of nuclear fuel in its cooling pool.

This isn't some elevated bathtub like the cooling pools at Fukushima. Oh, no. This cooling pool is forty feet UNDER GROUND AND forty feet ABOVE GROUND. It's EIGHTY FEET DEEP IN TOTAL. If they can't cool it, the corn belt is in trouble.

I'm guessing that it's the big rectangular building behind-left (actually touching) the round nuclear reactor containment building.

Why do I think that? Because it has no windows or ventilation and it's about the only building on-site large enough to hold the amount of spent nuclear fuel it has to hold - and, by the way, it was filled up to capacity in 2006 - which is why they had to start storing the excess spent fuel rods in those concrete dry casks outside of the pool. But I could be wrong. If I am, please send me a diagram - not an opiniongram.

The dry casks are visible near the top of the picture. They are grey concrete blocks set together on the large, grey square area.

The casks have white doors facing a little to the left in the photo. The NRC says there is 'no problem' should the casks become partially submerged by Missouri flood waters.

The back-up generators are probably flooded as well. They were ALSO what the rubber dam was in place to protect. Even if they aren't, there is water in the electrical system. That's what the yellow cards from the NRC were about last year - and those cards were never signed off as safe. There are at least six and probably dozens of NRC and government people there 'closely monitoring' the plant. All they can do is watch.

The 'emergency' plans were only thought up when the water started rising and were only implemented beginning on June 6. Before then, the plant owners were still pissing back and forth with the NRC that a flood that bad couldn't happen. And the brilliant rubber condom around the plant didn't just burst by itself. The dumbasses were piddling around and managed to pop it themselves!

So, when they tell me there is no danger at all, I know otherwise because the rubber dam was the last resort...and that ANY water higher than that is too much - and the water was clearly VERY high up on it when it burst.

I'm thinking that if I call another disaster, and it happens, it will start getting dicey in about sixty-four hours. From now.



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32 people shot in 3 days of Philly violence

Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/27/11:

It was a weekend of violence and mayhem - brutal even by Philadelphia standards. From Friday through Sunday, 32 people were wounded, six fatally, in about 20 shootings across the city, police said, and a seventh person died in a stabbing.

Police had not yet determined if the 33 victims represented the worst three-day span of violence in the department's recent history. But Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey said the onslaught stood out as one of the worst in his 31/2-year Philadelphia tenure.

"I don't know if we've ever had any more over a three-day period," he said of the shootings during a news conference Monday at Police Headquarters. "This certainly ranks right at the top, if not the top. It shows just how violent it can become on the streets of our city."

"We are lucky we did not have more homicides," Ramsey said, referring to two shootings in which 10 people were injured and in which police recovered more than 20 shell casings.

[...]



.

The military as a jobs program

Ellen Brown at Intrepid Report, 6/27/11:

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. . . . We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.”—Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953

In a Wall Street Journal editorial on June 8 bemoaning the failure of the Obama stimulus package, Martin Feldstein wrote, “Experience shows that the most cost-effective form of temporary fiscal stimulus is direct government spending. The most obvious way to achieve that in 2009 was to repair and replace the military equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan that would otherwise have to be done in the future. But the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department.”

You can’t make this stuff up. The most obvious way to stimulate the economy is to replace military equipment? And the Obama stimulus had nothing for the Defense Department? When veterans’ benefits and other past military costs are factored in, the military now devours half the U.S. budget. If military spending is such a cost-effective stimulus, why have the trillions poured into it in the last decade left the economy reeling?

The military is the nation’s largest and most firmly entrenched entitlement program, one that takes half of every tax dollar. Even if “national security” is considered our number one priority (a dubious choice when the real unemployment rate is over 16 percent), estimates are that the military budget could be cut in half or more and we would still have the most powerful military machine in the world. Our enemies (if any) are now “terrorists,” not countries; and what is needed to contain them (if anything) is local policing, not global warfare. Much of our military hardware is just good for “shock and awe,” not needed for any “real and present danger.”

Military spending is the very essence of “built-in obsolescence”: it turns out products that are designed to blow up. The military is not subject to ordinary market principles but works on a “cost-plus” basis, with producers reimbursed for whatever they have spent plus a guaranteed profit. Gone are the usual competitive restraints that keep capitalist corporations “lean and mean.” Private contractors hired by the government on no-bid contracts can be as wasteful and inefficient as they like and still make a tidy profit. Yet legislators looking to slash wasteful “entitlements” persist in overlooking this obvious elephant in the room.

[...]





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Gone With the Papers

Chris Hedges at TruthDig, 6/27/11:




I visited the Hartford Courant as a high school student. It was the first time I was in a newsroom. The Connecticut paper’s newsroom, the size of a city block, was packed with rows of metal desks, most piled high with newspapers and notebooks. Reporters banged furiously on heavy typewriters set amid tangled phone cords, overflowing ashtrays, dirty coffee mugs and stacks of paper, many of which were in sloping piles on the floor. The din and clamor, the incessantly ringing phones, the haze of cigarette and cigar smoke that lay over the feverish hive, the hoarse shouts, the bustle and movement of reporters, most in disheveled coats and ties, made it seem an exotic, living organism. I was infatuated. I dreamed of entering this fraternity, which I eventually did, for more than two decades writing for The Dallas Morning News, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor and, finally, The New York Times, where I spent most of my career as a foreign correspondent.

Newsrooms today are anemic and forlorn wastelands. I was recently in the newsroom at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and patches of the floor, also the size of a city block, were open space or given over to rows of empty desks. These institutions are going the way of the massive rotary presses that lurked like undersea monsters in the bowels of newspaper buildings, roaring to life at night. The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets.

The great newspapers sustained legendary reporters such as I.F. Stone, Murray Kempton and Homer Bigart who wrote stories that brought down embezzlers, cheats, crooks and liars, who covered wars and conflicts, who told us about famines in Africa and the peculiarities of the French or what it was like to be poor and forgotten in our urban slums or Appalachia. These presses churned out raw lists of data, from sports scores to stock prices. Newspapers took us into parts of the city or the world we would never otherwise have seen or visited. Reporters and critics reviewed movies, books, dance, theater and music and covered sporting events. Newspapers printed the text of presidential addresses, sent reporters to chronicle the inner workings of City Hall and followed the courts and the police. Photographers and reporters raced to cover the lurid and the macabre, from Mafia hits to crimes of passion.

We are losing a peculiar culture and an ethic. This loss is impoverishing our civil discourse and leaving us less and less connected to the city, the nation and the world around us. The death of newsprint represents the end of an era. And news gathering will not be replaced by the Internet. Journalism, at least on the large scale of old newsrooms, is no longer commercially viable. Reporting is time-consuming and labor-intensive. It requires going out and talking to people. It means doing this every day. It means looking constantly for sources, tips, leads, documents, informants, whistle-blowers, new facts and information, untold stories and news. Reporters often spend days finding little or nothing of significance. The work can be tedious and is expensive. And as the budgets of large metropolitan dailies shrink, the very trade of reporting declines. Most city papers at their zenith employed several hundred reporters and editors and had operating budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The steady decline of the news business means we are plunging larger and larger parts of our society into dark holes and opening up greater opportunities for unchecked corruption, disinformation and the abuse of power.

A democracy survives when its citizens have access to trustworthy and impartial sources of information, when it can discern lies from truth, when civic discourse is grounded in verifiable fact. And with the decimation of reporting these sources of information are disappearing. The increasing fusion of news and entertainment, the rise of a class of celebrity journalists on television who define reporting by their access to the famous and the powerful, the retreat by many readers into the ideological ghettos of the Internet and the ruthless drive by corporations to destroy the traditional news business are leaving us deaf, dumb and blind. The relentless assault on the “liberal press” by right-wing propaganda outlets such as Fox News or by the Christian right is in fact an assault on a system of information grounded in verifiable fact. And once this bedrock of civil discourse is eradicated, people will be free, as many already are, to believe whatever they want to believe, to pick and choose what facts or opinions suit their world and what do not. In this new world lies will become true.

[...]




...............
Interesting response to above, from "Dubet" at Common Dreams:


from the article:

~ The heavily oiled behemoths, the ones that spat out sheets of newsprint at lightning speed, once empowered and enriched newspaper publishers who for a few lucrative decades held a monopoly on connecting sellers with buyers. Now that that monopoly is gone, now that the sellers no long need newsprint to reach buyers, the fortunes of newspapers are declining as fast as the page counts of daily news sheets. ~

before we go walking down nostalgia lane, let us note the passage above...newspapers have been named incorrectly from the beginning...

they have always been 'ad' papers first, and 'news' papers second...

interesting these articles, referring to the dying 'press', only come at the issue from the point of view of the reporter...

here, we are, literally, taken into the throes of an actual Old Paper's newsroom, where the cigarette-and-coffee, rolled-up-shirt-sleeves, phone-ringing, frantic-typing environment radiate perceptive thinking, ethical standards, and hard work, all on the behalf of some vague, beloved Public...

why are we not taken down another hall, and into the same Old Paper's advertising department? were they not also coffee drinkers, and cigarette smokers, and typers?

where are stories that highlight the 'hey' day of that guy? the old newspaper ad man?

as the quoted passage reminds us, the newsroom was never the true heart of the paper...

the advertising department was...

when one combines this fact with the fact that what is printed is propaganda, one sees that, in buying a newspaper, one is paying to be tempted to purchases one might not otherwise make, and lied to regarding one's society...

no real reporting is taking place in America...it can't...

if it ever does, it is quickly squashed...killed...

those in the know, know...

perhaps we continue to romanticize the newspaper reporter because they are the only imagined foe for our oppressors, those of us in among the citizenry living via delegation, and all...

we hope reporters uncover, police investigate, and courts evaluate...

to accept this does not happen is uncomfortable...

understanding the importance of advertising, and selling, to our society clarifies much...

one might argue the ad man would get you closer to the truth than the news man...




.

Two mob attacks on random strangers and one mob robbery

on Sunday in Philadelphia:

Woman's leg broken, others hurt in Spring Garden mob attack

Philadelphia Daily News, 6/27/11--A WOMAN'S leg was broken and several other people were injured Saturday night when a large group of teens accosted pedestrians in Spring Garden, police and witnesses said.

Philadelphia police responded to two reports of pedestrians being assaulted by a large group of young people along Broad Street about 9:30 p.m.

One of those reports came from Emily Guendelsberger, 27, city editor for local arts and entertainment content for the Onion, the satirical newspaper and website. She was walking with seven friends on Green Street near Broad when they were accosted, she said. Guendelsberger, who remained hospitalized with a broken leg yesterday, declined to comment further.

A friend who was with her at the time, Daily News staff writer Molly Eichel, said that they were walking down Green Street when a group of teens was walking down Broad. "We heard kids yell, 'Run, run,' " Eichel said. "Some kid just came out of nowhere and punched my friend Charlie in the face."

Eichel said that when her group tried to run, about 20 teens chased them down the street. "They were kicking kids down and punching them when they were down," she said.

Two other friends sought treatment at area hospitals for facial injuries, Eichel said.

The only redeeming factor about the experience was that a few people realized the extent of Guendelsberger's injuries and tried to protect her, Eichel said.

From the hospital yesterday, Guendelsberger gave her protectors shout-outs on Twitter. "On the positive, a bunch of girls from the mob protected me from the boys trying to hit me and take my purse while I was on the ground," she wrote. "Also a car of women from out of town saw it going down, pulled over, and (I gather) circled around to protect me; wish I had gotten names."

According to the police report of the incident, Guendelsberger was "jumped" by 30 to 40 men who punched and kicked her numerous times. Police said they checked the area for surveillance but had no luck.

Shortly before Guendelsberger's assault, police said, they responded to another assault, about five blocks away at Broad Street and Fairmount Avenue, of a 20-year-old man who said that he was attacked by a large group of men and women.

Police said that he was treated for a bruise and abrasion under his right eye.

Twitter users said that the mob ranged from 50 to 100 people and that participants not only assaulted people but also threw trash cans and lit fireworks.

At U. Darby Sears, dozens invade & flee with thousands in merchandise

Upper Darby police released this surveillance image that they said was recorded during the invasion of the store by dozens of youths.

Philadelphia Daily News, 6/27/11--DOZENS OF West Philly boys - ranging in age from 11 to 19 - stormed a Sears store in Upper Darby on Thursday as part of a "flash mob" and made off with thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise, police said.

Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood said he believed that the group organized the mass theft through social networking, although the exact networking site was not yet clear.

He said that the kids traveled together on public transportation and arrived at the store on 69th Street en masse about 7:10 p.m.

The kids - Chitwood estimated there were around 40 boys - scattered throughout the store and began to "rob, steal and pillage," he said.

They took everything from sneakers to watches but left behind the boxes and tags, Chitwood said.

As of this weekend, Sears was still trying to tally up its losses, which were believed to be in the thousands of dollars, police said.

Responding officers were able to capture 16 of the suspects, the youngest of which was 11 and the oldest, 19. The 19-year-old was charged with retail theft and corrupting the morals of a minor.

The other 15, all of whom were juveniles from West Philadelphia, were charged with retail theft and released to the custody of their parents, Chitwood said.

"When this mob mentality comes to a community and robs a village, there has to be consequences," he said. "That's the only way you're going to stop this."

Chitwood said that while some of the parents were very upset when they picked their kids up, for some, it seemed just "like part of a day's work."

"People have to realize this is not condoned, funny or cute. It's criminal. Period," Chitwood said. "If you've got an 11-year-old involved in this type of mob mentality, what are they going to be doing when they are 16?"




.

Elderly woman asked to remove adult diaper during TSA search

Panama City News Herald, June 25, 2011:

A woman has filed a complaint with federal authorities over how her elderly mother was treated at Northwest Florida Regional Airport last weekend.

Jean Weber of Destin filed a complaint with the Department of Homeland Security after her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia.

Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search.

“It’s something I couldn’t imagine happening on American soil,” Weber said Friday. “Here is my mother, 95 years old, 105 pounds, barely able to stand, and then this.”

Sari Koshetz, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration in Miami, said she could not comment on specific cases to protect the privacy of those involved.

“The TSA works with passengers to resolve any security alarms in a respectful and sensitive manner,” she said.

Weber’s mother entered the airport’s security checkpoint in a wheelchair because she was not stable enough to walk through, Weber said.

Wheelchairs trigger certain protocols, including pat-downs and possible swabbing for explosives, Koshetz said.

“During any part of the process, if there is an alarm, then we have to resolve that alarm,” she said.

Weber said she did not know whether her mother had triggered an alarm during the 45 minutes they were detained.

She said her mother was first pulled aside into a glass-partitioned area and patted down. Then she was taken to another room to protect her privacy during a more extensive search, Weber said.

Weber said she sat outside the room during the search.

She said security personnel then came out and told her they would need for her mother to remove her Depends diaper because it was soiled and was impeding their search.

Weber wheeled her mother into a bathroom, removed her diaper and returned. Her mother did not have another clean diaper with her, Weber said.

Weber said she wished there were less invasive search methods for an elderly person who is unable to walk through security gates.

“I don’t understand why they have to put them through that kind of procedure,” she said.

[...]






.

Four Decades of Cruelty and Inhumanity to U.S. Political Prisoners

Glen Ford at Black Agenda, 6/22/11:

For almost 40 years, Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace have been in solitary confinement at Louisiana’s infamous Angola State Prison, in what is thought to be the longest period of enforced solitude in America’s vast prison gulag. Amnesty International says their treatment is “cruel and inhumane and a violation of the US’s obligations under international law.” Woodfox is now 64 years old, and Wallace is 69. They are two of the original Angola 3, convicted of the murder of a prison guard in 1972. The other member of the trio, Robert King, was released after 29 years in solitary confinement after pleading guilty to a lesser charge.

Under the conditions of solitary confinement, Woodfox and Wallace are restricted to their tiny cells for 23 hours a day. Three times a week, for an hour, they are allowed to exercise in an outdoor cage, if weather permits. For 40 years, they have not been allowed access to work or to education. And there has been no legitimate review of their cases in all that time.

There was never any physical evidence of the men’s guilt, only the very questionable testimony of other inmates, one of whom was bribed by officials and another of whom retracted his testimony. Woodfox and Wallace and King have been subjected to the greatest cruelties Louisiana has to offer because they became political prisoners after entering Angola, when they formed a prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. One prison official says flatly, that “there’s been no rehabilitation” from “practicing Black Pantherism.” In other words, the prison considers their politics to be their crime.

Albert Woodfox’s conviction has twice been overturned by lower courts on the basis of racial discrimination, prosecutorial misconduct, inadequate defense and suppression of evidence. But the U.S. Court of Appeals decided that Woodfox’s fate was Louisiana’s business. Amnesty International demands only that the two elderly prisoners be released from solitary. Woodfox and Wallace, it should be pointed out, became political prisoners after initially being incarcerated for criminal offenses.

There are scores of U.S. political prisoners that have languished behind bars for three or four decades. The National Conference of Black Lawyers has been pressing for their outright release, especially those who were wrongfully imprisoned due to the FBI’s COINTELPRO operation, which sought to “neutralize” and destroy radical political activists and organizations – most notably the Black Panther Party. In the cases of those targeted by COINTELPRO, it was the federal government’s lawlessness that led to a lifetime in prison. Therefore, the U.S. government is obligated to free them. But the United States continues to deny that there is such a thing as a political prisoner within its borders. The Obama administration is always eager to claim that other countries are abusing their political prisoners. It also says it wants to play an active role in the Human Rights Council of the United Nations. But that will require the U.S. to answer charges that it imprisons people for political reasons, holds them under cruel and inhuman conditions, and that racism pervades its criminal justice system.

.

Asesino masivo sentimental

Traducido del inglés para Rebelión por Germán Leyens, 26/6/11:




Cuando Obama llegó al poder había aproximadamente 35.000 soldados estadounidenses en Afganistán. Dentro de dos años, triplicó esa cantidad. Ahora, Obama anuncia que 10.000 soldados volverán a casa a fines de 2011, y 33.000 a fines del próximo verano. Hace dos ‘oleadas’, retira una, y declara que es una retirada exitosa, como la prometió. Me alegro de que Obama no sea mi contador, o los dos terminaríamos por estar presos por fraude, pero ¡espera un segundo!, Obama es mi contador, mi banquero, mi presidente.

¿Y por qué estamos en Afganistán? Oficialmente, estamos allí para combatir a los talibanes, a los que apoyamos inicialmente. El demócrata Jimmy Carter y el republicano Ronald Reagan, armaron, financiaron y entrenaron a sus combatientes por la libertad o islamofascistas. En los años ochenta, EE.UU. echó gasolina al fuego del fanatismo islámico para quemar a los soviéticos. Ahora, nosotros somos los soviéticos.

EE.UU. va a Iraq y a Afganistán, y pone cabeza abajo esos países, luego explica que sería irresponsable dejarlos al revés, pero resulta que mientras EE.UU. no se vaya, esos países seguirán estando en un lío. Con su presencia, EE.UU. hace que estallen bombas, luego insiste en que tiene que quedarse hasta que esas bombas dejen de estallar, ¡pero EE.UU. es la bomba! Una y otra vez, EE.UU. causa el incendio, y luego se presenta como bombero voluntario. Es la carga de ser el líder mundial en libertad, democracia, y venta de armas.

EE.UU.: eres un asesino masivo sentimental. Libras una guerra tras otra, luego pretendes llorar por algunas de las víctimas. (Las víctimas “nuestras”, no las víctimas “de ellos”.) Mientras Barack envía a hijos e hijas de EE.UU. a esas carnicerías innecesarias, Michelle nos insta a apreciar sus sacrificios sin sentido.

Mientras nuestros pelados realizan sus deberes de sobre-extensión imperial en ultramar, sus seres queridos lo pasan mal en casa, así que Michelle quiere que prodiguemos a esas familias alivio y ayuda: “Puede ser ayudando a un vecino a cortar el césped. Puede ser ofreciéndose a cuidar niños durante una tarde, a hacer una comida, arreglar una estufa, o acercarse a una familia de la reserva que vive lejos del apoyo de una instalación militar.” Por cierto, esos apuros podrían ser evitados si dejáramos de enviar a nuestros soldados a todas partes a matar y mutilar, y para ser eliminados a su vez.

Mientras el esposo mata, la esposa reconforta, pero a menudo, este truco de Jano es representado por el mismísimo payaso. Se ha convertido en un rito anual que Colin Powell pronuncie un solemne discurso en el césped del Capitolio el Día del Recuerdo. Este año volvió a rendir homenaje a los estadounidenses “que combaten en la guerra global contra el terrorismo, sirviendo y sacrificándose en Afganistán e Iraq y en otros puestos avanzados en las primeras líneas de la libertad. La vida de cada uno de ellos es preciosa para sus seres queridos y para nuestra nación. Y cada vida sacrificada en nombre de la libertad es una vida que no ha sido perdida en vano.”

Aunque Iraq no tuvo nada que ver con el 11-S y no poseía armas de destrucción masiva, Powell es capaz de afirmar, incluso ahora y con cara dura, que es una primera línea de la guerra contra el terrorismo. Una vez que terminó su untuoso e hipócrita palabreo, Powell se aproximó al gentío para abrazar a una docena de veteranos y a sus seres queridos. Dio una palmada en la espaldita del bebé de un hombre con daño cerebral y ciego. ¿Por qué no se levantó nadie, pero nadie, y gritó: “¡Oye Powell, no fuiste tú el que ayudó a llevarnos a la guerra con mentiras!? ¿No estuviste ante todo el mundo y mostraste engañosas fotografías satelitales de ‘laboratorios móviles para hacer armas biológicas’? En EE.UU. contemporáneo, un arquitecto de guerras puede jugar a consolar a sus víctimas, y nadie se inmuta.

También nos llevan a creer que beneficiamos a la gente que bombardeamos, acribillamos y violamos. Según Yahoo! News, el retiro de soldados estadounidenses produce “una mezcla de alegría y preocupación [entre los afganos

] mientras su nación se debate con la idea de menos ayuda”, de modo que invadir un país es ayudarle, pero ésa es la lógica del imperio. La próxima vez que alguien te dispare, ya sabes que te está ayudando.

Sin embargo, el imperio va hacia la bancarrota, de modo que nuestras víctimas deberían enviarnos voluntariamente montones de dinero. De visita en Bagdad, el congresista

Rohrabacher (de California) declaró: “Cuando Iraq se convierta en un país muy rico y próspero… esperamos que considere la devolución a EE.UU. de algunos de los mega-dólares que hemos gastado en ese país en los últimos ocho años. Esperamos que se considere una restitución porque EE.UU. se encuentra ahora cerca de una crisis económica extremadamente seria y ciertamente nos ayudaría si algunas gentes se preocuparan de nuestra situación, como nosotros nos hemos preocupado por la de ellas.” Bombardeados por Obama, los libios debieran sentir una gratitud semejante: “Si los libios, por ejemplo, están dispuestos a ayudar a pagar, a compensar a EE.UU., por lo que gastamos en ayudarles a pasar por este difícil período, es una manera de hacerlo”.

Con una mano, el Tío Sam te mata. Con la otra, extiende la mano para pedir limosna. ¡Dádsela ya, malditos ingratos! EE.UU. tiene terribles problemas. Con medios informativos como los que tenemos, nuestros dirigentes seguirán diciendo insensateces y no hay nada que podamos hacer al respecto.

EE.UU. tiene que encontrar urgentemente sus prioridades, pero no se presenta ninguna. Mientras se descompone, supura y convulsiona, pregunta a nuestro próximo presidente: “¿Pizza crujiente y fina o esponjosa? ¿American Idol o Dancing with the Stars?





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If You Want to Understand What’s Really Going on in the World, Stop Thinking Like a Middle Class American

William Hicks at Dissident Voice, June 25th, 2011:




I was having a conversation with a professional colleague the other day who had spent some time working in Egypt and was reassigned back home shortly before the protests erupted that resulted in the abrupt departure from power of Hosni Mubarak. We started talking about the state of the economy, and I mentioned how the reckless policies of the Federal Reserve, engaging in Quantitative Easing and setting interests rates near 0%, were a primary factor leading to Mubarak’s ouster and the civil unrest that has been spreading across the Middle East. My colleague, who spent a year in Cairo and presumably would have seen the conditions there first hand, looked at me quizzically and asked on what basis I was making my assertion.

I patiently explained that by flooding the world’s economy with liquidity, Benny and the Ink Jets (as I affectionately refer to Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) devalued the dollar and greatly increased speculative investment in the commodities markets by the same pack of jackals that crashed the economy in the first place. This has led to a dramatic rise in the costs of food and energy, which are priced in dollars due to America being in the advantageous position of having the world’s reserve currency. I specifically mentioned the exploding price of sugar, which had been cited in several news reports as having been a major factor in the initial uprisings in Tunisia that eventually spread to Egypt.

This only produced more obvious confusion on the part of my colleague. Sugar, he asked, how is that such a big deal?

I explained that historically, rising food prices have ALWAYS been a key factor in revolts against oppressive regimes. I went on to add that in order to really gain an understanding of what was happening in Egypt and elsewhere, my friend needed to stop thinking like a typical middle class American.

Not since the Great Depression have the majority of Americans had to think much about the costs of food and energy, which for most people during the post-World War Two period, have consumed only a relatively small percentage (maybe 10-20%) of the family budget. As I stated to my colleague, however, just the cost of food alone for the vast majority of Egyptians takes upwards of 50% or more of their annual income. Therefore, an increase of, say 25%, in the cost of basic foodstuffs like corn, wheat and sugar, a mere annoyance to most Americans, can literally be a matter of life and death to people living at or near subsistence level who do not have a food stamp program to fall back on to feed their children when times get rough.

At about this point, I sensed some understanding beginning to dawn upon my colleague. You know, he said, I never thought of it that way.

[...]





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Afghanistan: An American Rape

Gordon Duff at Veterans Today, 6/24/11:




Is “Slow Withdrawal” An Answer to Rape?

America went to Afghanistan under false pretenses. Even if you don’t buy in on the mountain of hard evidence that 9/11 was a staged false flag operation, there were no connections to Afghanistan or Osama bin Laden, not then and not now.

Did we attack Afghanistan because our former allies, the Mujaheddin, renamed “Taliban” had bad grooming practices or the more obvious reasons:

• The oil companies were desperate to have a gas pipeline through Afghanistan, tens of billions of dollars were involved and the Taliban was proving “tough” in negotiations.
• A puppet dictatorship in Afghanistan, such as with Karzai, would allow the “CIA and friends” to take over the world’s narcotics business. (our only real success in Afghanistan)
• Sinking America in a hopeless and unwinable war might just kill both Pakistan and Iran in process.
  • US = Dead
  • Afghanistan = Dead
  • Pakistan = Dead
  • Iran = Dead
  • Iraq = Dead
  • Israel = Picking up the pieces, pocketing the spoils
  • Congress and the Pentagon = in for a “piece of the action”

Afghanistan is simple to understand. The invasion was all lies, as with Iraq. The Taliban were the legal rulers. Many of the American “allies” in the Northern Alliance were druglords, more were infamous war criminals. Thousands of Afghans were murdered during the American takeover.

The new government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars, is hopelessly corrupt, the army America bought for them is half Taliban, half uninspired and unmotivated. Recent evaluations have shown almost every cent spent on “nation building” was stolen. Every criminal in the world has flocked to Kabul joining the kleptocratic Karzai’s mob and their USAID/CIA partners, robbing America blind and banking tens of billions in drug money.

[...]



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Obama follows ‘Wag the Dog’ script, even down to the rape scene

Wayne Madsen in Intrepid Report, 6/24/11:

In the 1999 flick “Wag the Dog,” White House aides try to build up anger against Albania by showing a phony Albanian young woman, played by Kirsten Dunst, trying to escaping rape at the hands of Albanian troops. The “rape” was faked and filmed in a studio, complete with a blue screen. The intent of the phony rape was to divert the public’s attention away from a presidential sex scandal and build up support for military action against Albania.

Fast forward to today and we see such “made in Hollywood” tactics being played out in Libya. On March 26, Eman al-Obeidy, said to be a Libyan law student and an aspirant journalist originally from Tobruk in rebel-held eastern Libya, entered the Rixos Hotel, the headquarters for the international media and claimed she was gang raped and kidnapped by Colonel Muammar Qaddafi’s military forces at a security checkpoint in Tripoli.

Al-Obeidy was bruised and scratched and said she entered the hotel by passing herself off as a member of the hotel staff. She claimed that the Libyan security forces recognized her accent from eastern Libya and then proceeded to rape her. Al-Obeidy, like the Kirsten Dunst character in “Wag the Dog,” became an instant media celebrity. For the anti-Qaddafi journalists nested at the Rixos, including those from The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, Reuters, and the Associated Press, Al-Obeidy immediately became a cause celebre with her tale of rape and being held in sub0human conditions by her assailants, who had the help of black African “mercenaries.” The black “mercenary tale would soon be debunked and Al-Obeidy’s rape story also began to lose credibility.

Libyan government officials opened a criminal case against Al-Obeidy’s accused attackers and Saadi Qaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, met with her after she was released from detention in Tripoli. Al-Obeidy was permitted to conduct interviews with the CNN’s celebrity in-breed Anderson Cooper and National Public Radio, among others. Al-Obeidy was permitted to air her grievances against the Libyan government and parrot Libyan rebel propaganda talking points from Tripoli. Eventually, Al-Obeidy ended up in Tunisia, after she said she was spirited out of Tripoli disguised as a Berber with the help of a defecting Libyan army officer. Somehow, Al-Obeidy managed to evade detection by over 50 security checkpoints on the coastal highway from Tripoli to the Tunisian border and enter Tunisia without any difficulties. This reporter, even with a Libyan visa and a Libyan diplomatic escort, was held up for at least one hour while crossing back into Tunisia from Libya. The delays were prompted by the border bureaucracies of both Libyan and Tunisian immigration and customs officials.

On May 5. Al-Obeidy was whisked into Tunis, courtesy of French diplomats who met her at the border, and by May 11, she was in Doha, Qatar, courtesy of the Libyan rebel Transitional National Council. It was apparent that Al-Obeidy’s propaganda value for the rebels and the West still had some currency because she was in the same city where Al-Jazeera has its broadcast headquarters. However, something went wrong in Qatar, an ally of the Libyan rebel movement and the NATO military offensive against Libya. Al-Obeidy was suddenly deported by Qatar. Al-Obeidy resorted to the same histrionics she employed against Qaddafi’s government: she claimed she was beaten by Qatari authorities, although she withheld rape charges in Qatar’s case. The Qatar press denied Al-Obeidy’s charges that she was beaten in Doha. The Libyan authorities claimed that Al-Obeidy had a history of mental illness and the events in Qatar lend credence to Tripoli’s contention about Al-Obeidy’s truthfulness.

WMR learned in Tripoli that Qatari officials were not satisfied with Al-Obeidy’s story or that proffered by her rebel movement handlers. The Qataris deported Al-Obeidy back to Benghazi, however, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton intervened and sent a U.S. government aircraft to Europe to fly her to political asylum in the United States. The United States arranged for Al-Obeidy to travel to Malta and on to Vienna where she was picked up by State Department officials. CNN, which through its MI-6 intelligence-linked reporter Nic Robertson, followed Al-Obeidy’s case with a priority zeal, reporting that after being deported from Qatar she ended up, via Italy, in a refugee camp in Timisoara, Romania, which, of course, is getting the scene for the drama closer to Albania, the manufactured antagonist in “Wag the Dog.”

Just a few weeks after the Al-Obeidy debacle, the puff piece-entranced Western media found a new heroine in the Middle East. Amina Abdullah Araf al-Omari said she was a Syrian-American lesbian woman blogging from Syria. It was later reported that Amina had been kidnapped by Syrian security forces and was being held incommunicado. It was later revealed that “Amina” was, in reality, Tom MacMaster, a 40-year old PhD student at Edinburgh University in Scotland. “Amina” had posted “her” anti-Syrian government diatribes on the lesbian website LezGetReal run by executive Paula Brooks. “Amina’s” photograph was lifted from the Facebook page of a young Croatian woman living in London. Less than 24-hours after “Amina” was exposed as MacMaster, Brooks, who billed herself as a lesbian woman with three children living in the Washington DC area, was, in fact, Bill Graber, a 58-year old man from Ohio.

Cass Sunstein, President Obama’s “information czar,” is on the record favoring the use of Wikileaks and websites to spread disinformation and propaganda. In the case of Libya and Syria, Sunstein’s policies appear to be fully underway. It is also noteworthy to point out that General Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency, who is also the commander of the U.S. Cyber-Command, which is tasked with carrying out offensive information warfare operations on the Internet, was an attendee at the recent Bilderberg meeting in St. Moritz, Switzerland. High on the agenda of the secretive and elite group was how to salvage what is becoming a quagmire in Libya. It is certain that Alexander offered up some enticing high-tech tricks to the gathering of the cabal that actually runs the world.

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