New moves to curb criticism of Israel in US and Canada

Kristin Szremski at Veterans Today, 7/31/11:



New legislation in the US threatens to conflate campus criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

A number of new initiatives to curtail freedom of speech by conflating opposition to Israeli crimes with anti-Semitism are underway in the United States and Canada.

The Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Anti-Semitism (CPCCA) issued a report in early July recommending the adoption of strict new standards defining anti-Semitism and the types of speech and campus activities that would violate them. Its report urged the Canadian government to adopt the European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia’s definition of anti-Semitism (“Report on the Inquiry Panel,” 7 July 2011 [PDF]). That definition suggests that any questioning of whether Israel has the right to exist as a state that privileges Jews over people of other religions or ethnic backgrounds amounts to anti-Semitism.

Though the Canadian group is not linked to the Ottawa government, it has 22 parliamentarians as members. Activities it deems as anti-Semitic and, therefore, calls to be banned, include events such as the Israeli Apartheid Week that was founded in Toronto and now takes place on college campuses internationally every March.

The Canadian report is just the latest attempt at stifling public discourse about Israel. Free speech and the unimpeded exchange of ideas are also under attack on America’s college campuses. Pro-Israel supporters have targeted federal funding for academic institutions, including support for research and academic conferences, under the pretext that criticism of Israel is “hate speech.”

Federal authorities from the Office of Civil Rights with the US Department of Education are investigating charges of anti-Semitism against the University of California Santa Cruz, as well as at other institutions within the California university system, according to published reports. These are the first investigations taking place since Title VI of the Civil Rights Act was re-interpreted in October 2010, allowing Jewish students, as members of a religious group, to claim discrimination under a provision that previously applied only to racial and ethnic bigotry.

A “dear colleague” letter issued by the Office of Civil Rights in October 2010 said that discrimination against a student who is a member of a religious group violates Title VI when the discrimination is based on the group’s “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics … or when it is based upon the student’s actual or perceived citizenship or residency in a country whose residents share a dominant religion or a distinct religious identity,” David Thomas, a US Department of Education spokesman, explained by email.

Bowing to the Zionist lobby

Major pro-Israel organizations such as the Zionist Organization of America and the Anti-Defamation League have lobbied for this re-interpretation for years. Title VI now can be applied to Jewish students who claim universities create hostile campus environments if they allow pro-Palestinian events or even class lectures critical of Israeli policies.

In other words, since Israel bills itself as a Jewish state, of which all Jews everywhere are automatic citizens, Jewish students can file complaints of anti-Semitism and discrimination based upon their perceived ethnicity and citizenship or residency in a country that has a “dominant religion.”

Dr. Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian-American professor of Near Eastern and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who founded the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) there in 2001, takes issue with the amended understanding of Title VI. While he agrees that Jewish students, as well as Muslim students, should be protected from discrimination based on their religious identity under Title VI, he believes the reinterpretation is actually being used to silence debate about Israel.

“Attempts to silence opposition to the illegal Israeli occupation and policies is un-American and amounts to political and academic censorship,” Bazian said via email. (Bazian is also the chairman of American Muslims for Palestine, the organization with which this writer is employed).

The Title VI reinterpretation and the subsequent case against Santa Cruz is part of a growing trend of stifling of protected political speech on college campuses. Several lecturers and professors have been censured and even denied tenure because they openly criticized Israeli policies or advocated for Palestinian rights.

Perhaps the most widely publicized cases are those of former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein and North Carolina State University professor Terri Ginsberg, both of whom were not given tenure because of their open criticism of Israeli policies in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Ginsberg initiated legal action against North Carolina State and her case is currently on appeal.

Freedom of information denied

The new interpretation has rejuvenated a 29-page complaint brought against the University of California Santa Cruz in June 2009 by lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, the contents of which have been kept secret by the Department of Education and university officials.

On 13 April, American Muslims for Palestine filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the complaint with the San Francisco Office of Civil Rights. Federal authorities declined the request on 22 April, saying that supplying the complaint would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy” and that it could “reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings,” both of which are listed as exemptions under the federal FOIA statute.

What is so troubling in the University of California Santa Cruz investigation is that the amended interpretation is being applied retroactively to Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint, which she filed more than one year before the October 2010 “dear colleague” letter. No one contacted from the university or the Department of Education would discuss how an institution can be held liable for something that was not considered to be a violation at the time it occurred.

“[The Office of Civil Rights] received the UC-Santa Cruz complaint … on 25 June 2009,” Thomas wrote in an email to American Muslims for Palestine. “On 7 March 2011, OCR formally notified the university and the complainant that OCR was opening for investigation the allegations that a hostile environment existed for Jewish students at the university in 2009 in violation of Title VI and that the university had notice of the hostile environment but did not have a process to adequately respond to hostile environment complaints.”

Thomas failed to respond to American Muslims for Palestine’s direct question about how the new interpretation could be applied retroactively, though it was posed three times in three separate emails on 13 and 15 April.

Jim Burns, a University of California Santa Cruz spokesman, also would not address that issue and instead referred it back to the Department of Education’s civil rights office. He did tell American Muslims for Palestine in an email, however, that the Office of Civil Rights is reviewing a complaint that “speech on campus that is critical of Israel creates a hostile environment for Jewish students.”

“We believe that [the Office of Civil Rights’] investigation will ultimately conclude that [the University of California Santa Cruz] diligently enforces laws, policies and practices that protect our students’ civil rights. But we also believe that our review of the matter with OCR will provide us with an opportunity to examine our relevant policies and practices to ensure that is the case,” he added.

If federal investigators find a university to be in violation of Title VI and the institution does not remedy the situation satisfactorily it could lose federal funding. This is a worst-case scenario to be sure, but it is one that seemingly threatens the open exchange of ideas on college campuses.

“While some of the recent allegations … might well raise a claim under Title VI, many others simply seek to silence anti-Israel discourse and speakers. This approach is not only unwarranted under Title VI, it is dangerous,” Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Presidents (AAUP), and Kenneth Stern of the American Jewish Committee, wrote recently in an open letter on AAUP’s website.

“The purpose of a university is to have students wrestle with ideas with which they may disagree, or even better, may make them uncomfortable. To censor ideas is to diminish education, and to treat students as fragile recipients of ‘knowledge,’ rather than young critical thinkers,” they added.

American Muslims for Palestine’s Hatem Bazian said the implications of the re-interpretation go far beyond free speech in the classroom and at extra-curricular events. Funding for scholarly research and academic conferences that bring up “legitimate criticism of Israel” may be at stake, he said.

“The new interpretation will directly, first and foremost, impact those who administer Title VI funding, and they for sure will be more hesitant and will engage in self-censorship in funding research or activities that are critical of Israel,” Bazian said.

Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League was one of 12 national organizations that urged the Department of Education to amend its Title VI interpretation. It may have just been a co-signer in that battle but the ADL has taken the lead in many high-profile cases to stifle free speech and public debate in its hundred-year history.

In March, the ADL, along with the American Jewish Committee and the Bay Area Jewish Community Relations Council, protested an academic conference at the UC Hastings College of the Law in March entitled “Litigating Palestine: Can Courts Secure Palestinian Rights?” Their protest was so effective the university board voted to remove its name and endorsement for the event and it prevented university Chancellor Frank Wu from making opening remarks.

Challenging Israel on campus

Writing about the incident in the San Francisco Chronicle, Cecilie Surasky, deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace, stated that “Perhaps for the first time in US history, there is an aggressive challenge to a one-sided narrative that covers up or justifies ongoing Israeli repression of Palestinians” (“Pressure on law conference threatens free speech,” 21 April 2011).

[...]





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Disastrous Outcomes From An Orchestrated Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts

July 28, 2011 "Information Clearing House" -- -- With the world concerned about US financial credibility and the poor outlook for the US economy, now is not the time for the Republicans to grandstand on the public debt. The debt ceiling needed to be quietly raised. Instead, the Republicans started a fire and then threw gasoline on it, creating an inferno that could burn up the US social safety net or the US Treasury’s credit rating and the US dollar’s role as reserve currency or what remains of the separation of powers.

Consequently, world financial markets, currency markets, commodity markets, central banks, and mutual fund money market and bond funds are on pins and needles.

This level of irresponsibility is seldom seen even from American politicians.

Republicans have created a totally unnecessary crisis and turned it into compelling political theater. Will the US default? Will entitlements be slashed? Will Obama seize the power of the purse from Congress in order to save the dollar and the US credit rating? None of these questions needed to arise.

While the world media fixates on the orchestrated debt ceiling crisis, the US government continues to bomb civilians in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia and continues with preparations to do the same thing to Syria and Iran.

The violations of other countries’ sovereignties, the naked aggressions that constitute war crimes, the murder of noncombatants, and the horrible moral and economic expense inflicted by the maximization of the military/security complex’s profits are somehow not a crisis. These are just routine, normal, everyday necessary events. Nothing to notice or to become upset about.

The offshoring of US jobs, GDP, tax base, and consumer demand that has eroded away the US economy and the government’s tax base, thus elevating the deficit, is somehow not a crisis. These are just the imperatives of globalism and the routine maximization of shareholders’ profits and management’s performance bonuses.

The US has become such a ridiculous collection of fools that no real crisis can be recognized. Instead, the country is mesmerized by a fake crisis.

The fake orchestrated crisis can easily turn into a real one. If income support programs are slashed, so will be consumer demand, and the US economy will decline further, widening the budget deficit and national debt.

If the Republicans force the country into default, the dollar will suffer. At the least, import prices will rise and the trade deficit with them. At the worse, the dollar will lose its reserve currency role, and the US will no longer be able to pay its oil bill in its own currency. With its balance of payments deep in the red, it has no foreign currency with which to purchase oil.

If Obama has to seize the power of the purse in order to prevent a new financial crisis from landing on top of the ongoing financial crisis, democracy will take another big hit.

Americans need desperately to ask themselves why they put into political office such utterly irresponsible and incompetent people capable of creating such a totally unnecessary crisis loaded with such disastrous potential outcomes. It would appear that the American population is too insouciant to use the vote with any care.

Little wonder that the president is becoming a Caesar.

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Joe Banford

just sent me this:

the band, Sweet Pussy,

broke up soon enough, their 7-inch

now a classic

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Bush returns to the scene of his greatest crime:

Bush to be in NYC to mark 10th anniversary of 9/11

NEW YORK (AP) — The ceremony at the World Trade Center site marking the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks will be a solemn but stately event that will include two presidents and a chance for victims' families to view the names of loved ones etched into the memorial, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

President Obama and Bloomberg will be joined by the leaders in charge during the 2001 attacks, including former president George W. Bush, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and former New York Gov. George Pataki. Current New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will also be there, he said.

Speaking on his weekly radio show Friday on WOR-AM, Bloomberg said the lawmakers will read short poems or quotes. No speeches will be given.

[...]

[A] museum is still under construction and is scheduled to open next year. Artifacts from the terrorist attacks are slowly being accumulated for the space, including a steel T-beam shaped like a cross that was discovered by a construction worker in the smoldering rubble. A national atheist group sued over the inclusion of the cross in the museum. It says all beliefs should be included, or none.

Bloomberg said on his radio show that the group had a right to sue, but the cross had a right to be there.

"This clearly influenced people," he said. "It gave them strength. In a museum you want to show things that impacted people's behavior back then, even if you don't think it was right. It's history. Museums are for history."

Bloomberg said other religious relics would be in the museum — a star of David cut from World Trade Center steel, a Bible found during the recovery effort and a Jewish prayer shawl.






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Congressman Mica calls TSA spending habits "idiotic"

WOKV, 7/13/11:




Jacksonville, FL —Congressman John Mica venting his frustration over the agency he helped create.

"Everywhere I turn, I'm appalled at what's taking place," says Mica.

The Transportation Security Administration got a tongue lashing from Congressman John Mica on their lapses in keeping passengers secure and the money he sees them wasting in the process.

"We've created an agency that's run pell-mell away from security and turned into a huge, unthinking, non-risk based bureaucracy ," added Mica.

He refers to much of the spending in their $80 billion budget as "idiotic" and warned TSA agents whether they decide to comply with an investigation or not, Congress will get the information it's looking for.

TSA is coming under fire after admitting there have been at least 25,000 security breaches at America's airports since the 9/11 terror attacks. That's about seven cases everyday of people being in unauthorized areas or banned items getting past TSA agents.



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More proof the Department of Homeland Security and TSA are actively destroying America

Madison Ruppert at Prison Planet, July 30, 2011:



[...] despite our teetering on the age of a possible default thanks to the clowns in Washington, $72 million in our non-existent tax dollars have been guaranteed to Lockheed Martin by the TSA.

This sum was given in exchange for more naked body scanners, which have a proven track record of health dangers and invasions of privacy.

The imaging machines which just happen to take completely nude, almost pornographic images that can be removed from the monitoring station for later “use” are going to be rolled out to an additional 300 airports.

Just when you thought you found your favorite airport that doesn’t use the radiation bathing machines, the TSA stepped in and spent our money on helping to ensure that you will never be able to avoid them.

This is just the beginning of the Department of Homeland Security’s economic destruction; earlier this month the DHS announced a plan to obtain 400 new scanners in addition to the hundreds already in operation.

How much money will the American taxpayer have to provide for this expansion of the highly contested scanners? Only a measly $300 million! What a steal!

Well, it might be if you’re one of the filthy rich executives of Lockheed Martin, but for the rest of America this spending will only compound our overwhelming debt problem.

It is worth noting that one of the advisors to the Department of Homeland Security just happens to be none other than Norman “Norm” Augustine, Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Lockheed Martin corporation.

Augustine had served as assistant director of defense research and engineering to the Secretary of Defense and both assistant secretary and under secretary of the Army among other so-called “distinctions,” according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Of course some of the completely ignorant or hopelessly propagandized people of America might think that this is completely okay since he no longer is CEO or Chairman and now all he does is lobby the DHS to give contracts to Lockheed Martin. Why is this acceptable? Why is a former CEO who unarguably has strong ties with his former corporation allowed to “advise” the DHS and clearly influence their spending?

The American people should be able to kick every corporate lobbyist in Washington. Every single so-called advisor and politician with ties to corporations needs to be removed from positions of influence.

Without ensuring that we do not have corporate lobbyists influencing contracting and who they are issued to, we will continue to see our tax money spent on useless, unwanted, and unnecessary projects. Why do the people of America not have control over our own money? Why are we just sitting back while the fascist corporate-government oligarchy robs us blind?

Our so-called representatives in Washington are just watching this happen, evidenced by the fact that the TSA purchased and installed 450 naked body scanners in March 2010 using funds from a stimulus package enacted by congress in 2009. The package, called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, was looted in order to hand over even more money to the corporations that are actively destroying America. To call this an effort to reinvest in America and assist in the economic recovery is nothing short of laughable. This is just one of the more recent examples, and there are several instances going back over the years.

Before the naked body scanners were purchased and put into operation (which just happened to make Michael Chertoff a ton of money), the TSA attempted to use “puffer machines” from General Electric and Smiths Detection. In 2004 the TSA purchased $30 million worth, or only 207 units, of these faulty machines without any real prior testing. Had they rigorously tested units before signing us on to $30 million in additional debt, they would have realized that the devices were easily clogged by dust and even more importantly easily confused by jet fuel fumes or humidity. If the units were properly tested, as any product should be before the government spends tens of millions on it, it would have come to the surface that the unreliable devices would cost an additional $48,000 in operating costs on top of the $150,000 device itself in order to be accurate. The program was stopped in 2006 and tossed by the wayside in favor of the full-body scanners.

According to the Washington Post, the Transportation Security Administration has spent about $14 billion in over 20,900 contracts with defense companies since the TSA’s creation in 2001. In 2010, the TSA requested more than $1.3 billion in taxpayer money to fund additional airport screening methods.

Even some government bodies have pointed out the massive incompetence and willy-nilly spending sprees the TSA and DHS engage in. The Government Accountability Office or GAO pointed out that the TSA has “not conducted a risk assessment or cost-benefit analysis, or established quantifiable performance measures” on the new technologies they purchase. This means that they spend the money without even knowing if it enhances security in any way.

If this isn’t proof of the marriage of government and the corporate world and the destruction it is wreaking upon our nation and our nation’s economy, I don’t know what is.

It is not only the GAO that is getting fed up with the TSA and their absurd spending policies. Congressman John Mica, who helped create the TSA, said, “Everywhere I turn, I’m appalled at what’s taking place.” He further adds, “We’ve created an agency that’s run pell-mell away from security and turned into a huge, unthinking, non-risk based bureaucracy.”

He called most of the spending carried out by the TSA through their behemoth $80 billion budget as “idiotic.” Congressman Mica could not be more accurate; as the TSA has reported at least 25,000 security breaches since the 9/11 terror attacks in American airports.

This is an indication of the complete failure and mismanagement of the agency, not an indication that we need to give them more money. This fallacious argument has been made time and time again, regardless of the massive logical holes.

If there wasn’t enough damning evidence of the rampant corporatism and corruption in these departments, the threat made to Congressman Jason Chaffetz by the DHS regarding his discussion of the 25,000 breaches since 9/11 is another indication that something is seriously wrong here.

Nothing short of the entirety of America stepping back and noticing the over-arching trend of wealth redistribution from the people to the elite carried out by corporations and their government cronies can stop this. Without all of America demanding that our money be accounted for and only spent when and where we decide it should be, the DHS and TSA will continue to economically rape our nation.

Without even covering the invasions of privacy, humiliation, enabling of drug trafficking, molestation, etc. the TSA and DHS have given us enough evidence to criminally convict the corrupt individuals behind the contracting decisions.

Americans should stop blindly accepting government spending and start making it clear to our supposed representatives in Washington that we will no longer stand for the continuation of these practices that serve only the banksters who issue us the debt and the corporations to whom the money is funneled.

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Nick Turse,

a white guy best known for his work at the Nation, reviews Vietnam novels by three other white guys, Karl Marlantes, David Rabe and Wayne Karlin:

[...] This wave of Vietnam War literature features the familiar grunt prose, patrol drama and punji pits, alongside a new, ultimately inadequate attempt to empathize with the formerly faceless enemy [...]

Ah, the house of mirrors existence of narcissistic American liberals!

Meanwhile, my Vietnam novel, Love Like Hate, has been completely ignored.




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Four charged in Center City rampage

Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/30/11:



Four people, including an 11-year-old boy, who took part in a destructive romp through Center City Philadelphia on Friday night face charges of assault and conspiracy.

The four were among a crowd of marauding youths who swarmed the sidewalk at Juniper and Walnut streets about 9:15 p.m. and pounced on a 33-year-old man, punching and kicking him. Police say the attack appeared to be random.

Moments later, at 15th and Sansom, a mob descended on a 59-year-old man and kicked, punched and beat him. This attack, too, was random, police said.

The beatings, which happened in plain view of people out for a stroll on a summer night or on their way to popular Center City restaurants, stunned passersby. Calls to 911 flooded in to police, who quickly made arrests.

On Saturday, a 19-year-old man and three juveniles, - ages, 11, 16 and 17 - were charged with conspiracy, aggravated, assault, and recklessly endangering another person.

District Attorney Seth Williams decried the assaults.

"We will not tolerate marauding, destructive youth terrorizing our city," he said. "We will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law and we are working with the police to find ways to prevent these occurrences."



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Disclose the race of flash mob victims and attackers.

Dennis Byrne at Chicago Now, June 8, 2011:

Chicago media must identify the race of the aggressors and victims in "flash mob" attacks.

There, that wasn't so hard, was it?

You'd think it was from all the handwringing within and without the media about whether the public should be told whether these are cases of black youth randomly attacking whites. Or of whites attacking blacks. Or of racially mixed gangs attacking racially mixed victims.

If the attacks are not racially motived, then describing the race of the attackers and victim will clear up the matter. The factual reporting will put to rest any suspicion that random, racially motivated crimes are breaking out. Or feed false stereotypes.

But if these are hate crimes, then the public has an equal right to know. Because an outbreak of racial hatred by any group is a serious problem that must be addressed.

The other side of this argument--the side that thinks the public doesn't have a right to know--argues that disclosure of a possible white-on-black nature of the attacks will inflame racial animosity. They would have us believe that race, as a motivating factor, must be ignored.

Problem is, the same people often vehemently argue that the racial nature of violent attacks must be disclosed when the victims are black and the attackers are white. Such hypocrisy doesn't help their case.

Police reports routinely describe the race of the victims and attackers; the media shouldn't ignore these data when there is a strong suspicion of racial motivation in a series of attacks such as Chicago has been experiencing.

Arrested as suspects in downtown mob action. From left: Dvonte Sykes, Trovolus Pickett, Derodte Wright

This is hardly a new issue for the media. In the early 1960s, as a journalism student at Marquette University, we debated whether the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel should run mug shots of men who have been arrested. One side argued that running the picture would unfairly strengthen racial stereotypes. The other side argued that if you run pictures of African American arrestees, you should run everyon'e mug shots. As I recall, the latter position won, in a way; no one's picture was run, unless race was an integral part of the crime. In other words, a hate crime.

So, let's call it what it is. And trust that reasonable people will see it for what it is. It is not an effort to stereotype young black men as violent, or that "they" all harbor racist sentiments toward whites. It is not an effort to downplay black-on-black violence. It is information that we all need to help understand and solve the problem. It's a symptom of a hurt crying for a cure.

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Mob violence in Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE, 7/5/11-- Surveillance video taken Sunday night shows a crowd looting at a Milwaukee gas station. It was just one of the disturbing incidents in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood that evening.

The video showed that around midnight, after the July 3 fireworks, about a dozen or so teenagers filed into a BP gas station.

Seconds later, they started running around grabbing for food and candy, even leaving the store with displays and cases of potato chips, the video shows.

"It was just a lot of rowdiness. They were up to no good. Sort of crazy. There were groups all over the street that night," witness Marylyn Kruger said.

Kruger said she saw a group of 20 headed west on North Avenue. Another neighbor, who didn't want to be identified, said he heard fireworks coming from the gas station right before the crowd got out of control inside.

He said the group was large, and many were throwing bottles at the building.

"There was a large mob, (a) group of 75 to 100 people that were looting the store, making runs in and out," the witness said.

Then, witnesses described a large group attacking people near Kilbourn Reservoir Park.

Police said they were investigating three robberies in the park that occurred shortly after the BP incident.

One victim told 12 News reporter Marianne Lyles that her sister's jaw was broken.

Police said the first of those park robberies was an armed robbery and occurred at 11:50 Sunday evening.

Police have arrested three people in connection with that robbery.

At 12:15 Monday morning, a group described by police as "moblike" attacked two people, robbing them.

Three minutes later, police said a mob attacked two other people, robbing them, but that incident was not reported until the evening.

A total of four people were injured, but police said all have been released from hospitalization.

[...]









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Nervous days come to Boystown

Laura Washington at Chicago Sun Times, 7/11/11:




In the heart of Lakeview, the soul of Boystown is roiled. Its name belies the history of Chicago’s trendy North Side district. Longtime residents like me know that 30 years ago the Boystown area was a working class, nondescript strip along North Halsted Street. Spurred by gentrification and gay liberation, it has morphed into a yuppified residential neighborhood straddled by a booming entertainment strip.

Now, the neighborhood’s homeowners, gay alderman and community center are coming to grips with the burden of its success.

Last week, a YouTube video of a mob brawl and stabbing went viral, creating widespread outrage and ubiquitous headlines.

Over the July 4 weekend, a midnight street brawl among a dozen or so young people hospitalized a 25-year-old man and fed fear and outrage among community residents and business owners. It was the third violent attack in the area in recent weeks, according to news reports.

It’s been a long time coming. For years, the neighborhood has been plagued by security concerns, racial antipathies, transgender intolerance, economic divides, business consequences, political gamesmanship and dysfunctional behaviors.

In Chicago, street crime is a growing and complex phenomenon. In Boystown, it is overlaid by a clarion call for diversity, personified by the Center on Halsted. When the nationally recognized LGBT oasis opened in 2007, the community came.

Those LGBT youths who came farthest — from the city’s South and West sides — had nowhere else to go, being pariahs in their own homes. Insidious and rampant homophobia in African-American communities sent them scrambling for the “safe” confines of Boystown. The Center offered an exhaustive and alluring smorgasbord of services. And an open door.

They came in droves and rainbow colors, looking for excitement, adventure, acceptance. Some — gay and straight — were looking for trouble.

Boystown is booming. Lakeview homeowners are shocked to find discarded liquor cans, condoms and drug paraphernalia on their doorsteps. Gaggles of young people cavort into the wee hours every weekend night.

The police and politicians don’t talk about it, but drug dealing, gang activity, prostitution and muggings are not uncommon. They also don’t want to talk about the fact that many of the perpetrators are people of color.

My husband hates it when I say I told you so.

Three summers ago, I wrote that trouble was brewing in Boystown. Even then, the Center was at capacity. The gay bar owners were nervously whispering about the “newcomers.” The race baiters were charging that white elites don’t want “us” in “their” neighborhood.

“Too many people are averting their eyes from the community’s dirty laundry in the name of political correctness,” I wrote back then.

It’s time for some truths.

It’s not “either, or.” That stabbing incident was instigated by a dangerous mob of black youths, but many more innocents are being unfairly stereotyped and vilified by the haters.

The police must be honest about the mayhem and send a fierce message: The bad news boys will be arrested and prosecuted. The mayor, alderman and business and civic leaders must find serious resources for security and alternative programs for our young people. Citizens must be watchdogs.

And not just in Boystown. In the Gold Coast, North Michigan Avenue, North Avenue Beach, Englewood, Roseland, Humboldt Park.

Right in your own backyard.

Flash Mobs ~ Wilding ~ Riots ~ Coming to a city near you?

Snipe at Xavier Forum, 04-15-2010:




Flash Mobs Take Violent Turn in Philadelphia
Mobs Are Born as Word Grows by Text Message (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/25/us/25mobs.html)

But these so-called flash mobs have taken a more aggressive and raucous turn here as hundreds of teenagers have been converging downtown for a ritual that is part bullying, part running of the bulls: sprinting down the block, the teenagers sometimes pause to brawl with one another, assault pedestrians or vandalize property.

...

Flash mobs are not unique to Philadelphia, but they have been more frequent here than elsewhere. Others that resulted in arrests and injuries have been reported over the past year in Boston, South Orange, N.J., and Brooklyn.

...

In the past year, at least four of the flash mobs have broken out in the city, including one on Saturday in which roving teenagers broke into fights, several onlookers were injured and at least three people were arrested.

“It was like a tsunami of kids,” said Seth Kaufman, 20, a pizza deliveryman at Olympia II Pizza & Restaurant on South Street. He lifted his shirt to show gashes along his back and arm. He also had bruises on his forehead he said were from kicks and punches he suffered while trying to keep a rowdy crowd from entering the shop, where a fight was already under way.

“By the time you could hear them yelling, they were flooding the streets and the stores and the sidewalks,” Mr. Kaufman said.

...

The flash mobs have raised questions about race and class.

Most of the teenagers who have taken part in them are black and from poor neighborhoods. Most of the areas hit have been predominantly white business districts.

In the flash mob on Saturday, groups of teenagers were chanting “black boys” and “burn the city,” bystanders said.

In a Feb. 16 melee, 150 teenagers spilled out of the Gallery shopping mall east of City Hall during rush hour and rampaged through Macy’s, knocking down customers and damaging displays.

The police arrested 15 of the teenagers and, according to one report, some had not been allowed to call their parents six hours after they were detained.

That link was from the New York Times and an article about Philly. It seems like the flash mob concept is spreading...

Spreading to the Country Club Plaza in Kansas City:

What’s going on at the Country Club Plaza? (http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/blog/2010/04/whats_going_on_at_kansas_citys_country_club_plaza. html)


Apparently, the Country Club Plaza was an ugly scene this past weekend.

The Kansas City Police Department said that between 750 and 1,000 youngsters descended on Kansas City’s heralded and austere shopping and entertainment district on Saturday night.

By the end of the night, police were using pepper spray to diffuse various problems being caused on the Plaza.

Near Race Riot Engulfs Country Club Plaza (http://www.kcconfidential.com/?p=14881)

“This wasn’t a band of blacks, this was the blacks taking over the Plaza,” says eyewitness Craig Glazer. “Then the police shut it down. And there was constant gunfire – I heard 30 to 40 shots while I was there for about 10 minutes. Now that doesn’t mean they were shooting at people, but there were shots going up in the air. You have to give the police credit though; they shut it down.”

From the KC Mayor (http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8596#ixzz0lCAjgFsv):

"Flash mobs, wilding…whatever you’d like to call it…is nothing new, a phenomenon that seems to follow spring weather on an increasingly more frequent basis.

Kansas City Police officers, like their counterparts from New York to Los Angeles, are dealing this spring with fast-developing, sometimes unruly crowds brought together by text message, Twitter and Facebook. On Saturday night, on the Country Club Plaza, Kansas City Police dealt with more than 700 mostly middle and high school students who gathered quickly, disrupted businesses and frightened customers and visitors to the Plaza. There were injuries. There was disruption. This is not how we do things in Kansas City.

Read the chilling police report on the Plaza incidents (http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8592#ixzz0lCB8ftdp)

The Saturday night teenage mobs that descended on the Country Club Plaza did a lot of damage -- to property and to a city's psyche.

Take a look at the official police report on the incidents, found here.

These are the kinds of things the Plaza and its merchants and customers don't like to see in print:

-- "The Classic Cup, 301 West 47th was a central focus and had numerous large disturbances in front of the business. Several complaints were received from patrons at this location and their fear of being hurt."

-- "We responded to PF Changs to assist with clearing juveniles out of the restrooms. They were harassing customers and blocking the foyer of the business."

-- "Citizens were continually stopping officers and complaining of the crowds, that they were being pushed and shoved, and that the kids were trying to intimidate them."

-- "Every time there was interaction with any of the juveniles obscenities were flowing freely along with disrespect not only for authority but anyone they came into contact with."

-- "Numerous businesses contacted police in regards to wanting to make complaints. Also, citizens from out of town asked officers on several occasions if this was normal or stated they would not come back."

Don't ignore racial aspect of Plaza mobs (http://voices.kansascity.com/node/8600#ixzz0lCC0WMJ7)

Why are the black kids going to the Plaza?

I certainly don't have all the answers, but one obvious reason: That's where the crowd of mostly white adults hangs out.

And the youth know their presence will be disturbing to people who aren't used to seeing so many black kids in one place.

KC police brace for return of unruly youths to Plaza (http://www.kansascity.com/2010/04/12/1873511_kc-police-brace-for-return-of.html?storylink=omni_popular#ixzz0lCCyVbKj)

Greenwell said police were expecting trouble last weekend, but not of the magnitude that was delivered when as many as 900 juveniles swarmed the Plaza streets and sidewalks. Police think texting and social media played a role in the wave of youths.

Police had 21 extra officers in place Saturday beyond the usual number of officers and Plaza security guards, but they were quickly outnumbered.

The youths “were destroying property, pushing people as they walked down the sidewalk and spitting on people,” Greenwell said. “It was just mass chaos and mayhem.”

Greenwell said she thought the youths showed up to cause problems.

“You could feel the tension in the air,” she said. “I don’t know how many people asked for escorts to their vehicles because they didn’t feel safe.”

Youths maliciously pushed a high school student wearing her prom dress into a restaurant patio fountain. Other youths knocked down, beat up and robbed a Grandview couple, stealing her purse and his eyeglasses.

A fight in a parking lot left a 16-year-old boy with a broken jaw and serious head injuries.

Juveniles approached diners on the patio of the Cheescake Factory who had to-go boxes and grabbed the food, tossing the boxes into fountains, police said.

Police said they noticed a “mass exit” of paying customers from the Plaza about 10 p.m.

On Easter, New York City had a flash mob in Times Square:

NYPD arrests dozens after gang runs amok in Times Square, Herald Square (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/04/05/2010-04-05_nypd_arrests_dozens_after_easter_night_gang_may hem_in_times_square_herald_square.html#ixzz0lCEGZJ Pc)

The latest outbreak of midtown mayhem - which the mayor Monday declared an episode of "wilding" - resurrected memories of the "bad old days of the 1970s."

Fifty-six youths were arrested or given summonses after hundreds of thugs rampaged through Times Square and Herald Square on Easter Sunday night.

Four people - a man and a woman in Times Square and two women outside Macy's - were shot in what cops say is becoming an annual tradition.

"It came out of nowhere. I just saw people running and I got hit," said Keanu Griffin, 18, a senior at Aspiration High in Brooklyn, who was shot in the thigh.

She said she and five friends were heading to the subway after eating at T.G.I. Friday's when they were engulfed by the melee.

[...]




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3 arrested in violent mob attacks in Center City

An an incident from a month ago, also in Philadelphia. ABC, 6/29/11:

Pictured (from left) are 20-year-old Terrance Howard, 18-year-old Erica Rockymore, and 19-year-old Aleek Hamilton.

PHILADELPHIA - June 29, 2011 (WPVI) -- Police have made three arrests after a mob of young people terrorized Center City Saturday night.

Police say a woman and her cousin were sitting at a window table inside the Max Brenner restaurant, located on 15th Street between Walnut and Locusts streets, when a young man ran up and stole a cell phone from the table. When the woman went to chase after the man she was blind-sided with a punch to the jaw. She turned to see her attacker, who continued to threaten her, backed by several other girls.

A 32-year-old woman from Delaware, who was also inside the Max Brenner restaurant, also had her cell phone stolen by the mob.

Police arrived on the scene and asked the assault victim if she would be able to identity her attackers if found - to which she said "yes."

The victim, along with her cousin, then accompanied officers to the intersection of 11th and South streets where they found the mob, undaunted by police presence.

The victim identified 19-year-old Aleek Hamilton as the cell phone thief and 18-year-old Erica Rockymore as the assailant.

Officers also arrested 20-year-old Terrance Howard of Frankford, who was found in the possession of the cell phone belonging to the Delaware woman at Max Brenner's.

Police say the wave of violence started at music festival around 9:30 p.m. Saturday at Broad and Susquehanna and headed south, with upwards of 200 young people on a rampage.

"We were walking down the street then, out of nowhere, there's a hundred kids," said Rajiv Sainath. He and a group of friends were on Green Street near Broad when they were engulfed by the mob.

[...]





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Mob violence in Greensboro, NC

DigTriad, Jul 27, 2011:



Greensboro, NC -- "Within a minute, I'd say, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds...I'm not being dramatic...hundreds of young people...just came descending upon this area from further downtown."

A scary attack... Out of nowhere... Injuring a community leader.

Mitchell Sommers said he got caught up in a swarm of people---and someone punched and kicked him.

A viewer told us about the attack Saturday night in Center City Park.

It's a story you saw only on WFMY News 2 and digtriad.com.

Violent flash mobs are popping up across the country.

But was this one?

Webster's dictionary defines flash mob as "a group of people summoned (as by e-mail or text message) to a designated location at a specified time to perform an indicated action before dispersing."

Police aren't calling it a "flash mob."

But they said teenagers are using social media to plan the gathering and then it's turning violent.

Center City Park is open to anyone.

There is no limit to how many people can gather here.

No matter what you call it - - there's a large group of people gathered on weekend nights as many as 400 people.

Police said they are adding more officers.

"The groups that are gathering and using social media here in Center City and Center City Park are texting one another," explained Chief Ken Miller. "Looking for a place to hang out and socialize. They're in the park for hours prior to the park closing."

Chief Miller said it's people 30 and under gathering.

And as the park closes at 11, that's when they're seeing fights and vandalism.

"And we saw the couple of affrays and assaults or assault and couple of affrays that occurred this weekend," said Miller.

So, we asked him:

What do you want to tell people in terms of coming to downtown Greensboro on the weekend whether it's center City Park or to the bars. Is it safe?

"I think Center City is safe. Is it event free? No," answered Miller.

[...]



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Center City hit by violent mob of teens

Philadelphia Inquirer, Jul. 29, 2011:





A mob of teens injured at least two people and robbed others during a brief rampage Friday night in Center City, police said.

About 9:15 p.m., police started receiving 911 calls of a group of 20 to 40 teens assaulting people. Police found a man on the ground bleeding badly from the head at Walnut and Juniper Streets. He was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.

A street robbery was reported at 16th and Spruce Streets, police said. An iPhone was taken in that or another robbery. A man was assaulted at 15th and Sansom Streets, police said. Other people also reported being victimized. A man said he saw a group beating a man at Fourth and Walnut Streets. There was also vandalism at 15th and Locust Streets. At least five teens were arrested.

Brian Mishico, who was working the door at Good Dog Bar & Restaurant, said a crowd of about 30 youths, some who looked as young as 12, split into two groups as they walked down 15th Street.

On one side of the street, the marauding youths knocked over a planter at the Aria condominium building. "They just knocked over everything on the street," he said.

On the other side of 15th, kids started randomly fighting pedestrians on the sidewalk in front of the Max Brenner restaurant.

"It's crazy. I've never seen anything like it," Mishico said. "It seems totally random."

A patron at Fado, at 15th and Locust, said that the group then turned left on Locust heading toward Broad and came upon two men and a woman. They started fighting the men, then someone grabbed the woman's hair and punched her in the head.





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Ubasuteyama, USA

As published on Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, OpEd News, CounterPunch and Intrepid Report, 7/29/11:





Modern industrial civilization weakens the family, which is not necessarily bad, since it allows children to escape tyrannical parents. In such a society, the home is not so much a socializing haven as a motel, where wage earners drive back each evening only to ignore each other. FaceBook has become a hearth and shrine, and independence is having your own flat screen TV. Behind locked doors, the kids chill in solitary confinement, while you and the spouse can have separate finances, night outs and flings, and all is good until everyone grows old, likely alone, which brings us to the question of Social Security.

Until 2010, Social Security had always been a net gain, meaning that money contributed by workers had always exceeded the amount sent to retirees. This surplus means that Social Security, as is, should be sustainable until 2036, but that’s assuming the economy won’t seriously unravel, but even if it will, Social Security should be the very last program to be tampered with. Waste is needless wars and bank bailouts, not money spent on the old and the disabled.

In a traditional society, one must take care of one’s aging parents, and let’s not sugarcoat this. There is a Vietnamese proverb, “One mom can feed ten children, but ten children can’t feed one mom.” In Saigon, an old lady also confided to me, “My daughter pinched my inner thigh out of spite the last time she gave me a bath, so I said to her, ‘Why don’t you go ahead and kill me already?’”

In the Republic of Goldman Sachs, NASCAR and Lady Gaga, however, most kids won’t be around to pinch our inner thighs as we fade into senility. Also, more American women won’t have any children. In 1970, it was only one in ten. Today, it’s one in five. Fewer of us are also getting married. What you have, then, is a huge aging population without any income beyond the Social Security check that arrives each month.

Substituting for the missing children, three workers now support each retiree, but this is only fair, since for decades, these old people were the de facto filial sons and daughters of other senior citizens.

As working citizens, we have no choice but to participate in Social Security, but this has never been a problem, since the vast majority of us has always recognized its necessity. Who’d want to be old and curled up under a bridge?

At $1,177, your average social security check will pay for a one bedroom apartment in a semi-slum neighborhood, plus enough leftover for discount groceries, bought with several fistfuls of coupons. It’s not much, but it’s survival, and not something to be messed with, unless, of course, you belong to the very rich.

The wealthy hate Social Security because they don’t need it. Even the concept of surviving on a grand a month boggles their minds. That is so pitiful! Such chump change won’t even get them three bottles of Pinot Noir at Bistro Bis, a favorite of belt-tightening advocate, Paul Ryan. Never been there, but if I go, I’ll order a Spam musubi. Can I have an extra plate, please? Me and the wife will share.

For the wealthy, for people whose earnings derive mostly from investments and dividends, and not grunting work, it is somehow scandalous that we should get a thousand a month after a lifetime of honest labor. They can steal from us to finance their endless war and banking shenanigans, but it’s not OK for us tapped out lumpens to have a minimum income in old age? Instead of gutting Social Security, we should wipe out the superfluous Department of Homeland Security.

This vicious campaign against Social Security is nothing but class warfare, pure and simple. Unless we do something about it, and soon, the ruling class will continue to rip us off as we sweat, and starve us when we’re no longer useful. They and their enablers, Bush, Obama and Boehner, et al, are not of us or among us. Never on the streets except when hustling votes, they never see the senior citizens already sprawling on our sidewalks.

Old people of limited means are a drag, really, since they can’t be sent to war, and you may have to clean up after them, instead of the other way around, as is customary with the poor. What good is a poor person who won’t clean your toilet, give you a sensual massage or kill and die for the empire?

According to Japanese legends, Ubasuteyama is a mountain where old people are abandoned to die. With each cut to Social Security, we will be erecting our own Ubasuteyama.








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U.S. Soldiers ‘Sprayed Agent Orange Across Korea’

Veterans Today, July 27th, 2011:

Many U.S. soldiers who served in Korea in the 1960s and 70s sprayed the lethal defoliant Agent Orange throughout Korea, a former U.S. Army captain told a National Assembly hearing on Monday.

Phil Steward said he started asking around in 2005 and got in touch with U.S. soldiers who served in Korea during the 1960s and 70s, and they admitted that they had experience using Agent Orange across Korea. “Agent Orange didn’t stay on the DMZ. Agent Orange was sprayed through a wide, wide area of South Korea,” he said.

“We were told, ‘It’s totally safe and it won’t hurt you at all,’” he added. “We were told, ‘You can drink it, you can brush your teeth with it, or you can bathe in it. It won’t hurt you. Those were lies.”

[...]





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More Than One Shooter on Island; Oslo Bomb Drill Just Concluded; Was It NATO’s Revenge for Norway’s Decision to Stop Bombing Libya?

Webster Tarpley at Veterans Today, 7/24/11:

Washington DC, July 24, 2011 – The tragic terror attacks in Norway display a number of the telltale signs of a false flag provocation. It is reported that, although the world media are attempting to focus on Anders Behring Breivik as a lone assassin in the tradition of Lee Harvey Oswald, many eyewitnesses agree that a second shooter was active in the massacre at the Utøya summer youth camp outside of Oslo.

It has also come to light that a special police unit had been conducting a drill or exercise in downtown Oslo which involved the detonation of bombs – exactly what caused the bloodshed a few hundred meters away little more than 48 hours later. Further research reveals that United States intelligence agencies had been conducting a large-scale program of recruiting retired Norwegian police officers with the alleged purpose of conducting surveillance inside the country. This program, known as SIMAS Surveillance Detection Units, provided a perfect vehicle for the penetration and subversion of the Norwegian police by NATO.

A motive for the attack is also present: as part of its attempt to mount an independent foreign policy, including the imminent diplomatic recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a general rapprochement with the Arab world, Norway was leading the smaller NATO states in dropping out of the imperialist aggressor coalition currently bombing Libya. Norway was scheduled to stop all bombing and other sorties against the Gaddafi forces as out of August 1 at the latest.

Finally, the CIA limited hangout operation known as Wikileaks has already furnished a prefabricated off-the-shelf case for incompetence and malfeasance against the current Norwegian government that is doing all these things – in the form of a series of real or doctored dispatches which document the alleged negligence of this government in dealing with the terrorist threat, all in the view of US State Department officials.

VG of Oslo: “Several” Eyewitnesses Say there were Two Shooters on the Island

As noted, world press and media of the Anglo-American school have immediately battened onto Breivik as an archetypal lone assassin cast in the mold of Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and so many others. The problem for the terror mythographs is that , in most of these cases, there is credible to overwhelming evidence that these figures could not have acted alone. Among more recent loan assassins, Breivik could be compared to Major Nidal Hasan of Fort Hood, Texas, whose shooting spree dates back to November 2009. Hasan is accused of having killed seven people. At the time, it was considered remarkable that Hasan had managed to kill so many armed soldiers on the military base. But early reports suggested that there were one or two other shooters in addition to Hasan. As usually happens, these extra shooters were soon expunged from the hegemonic media narrative.¹

In the Norwegian case, the evidence that Breivik was not alone in claiming his fearful toll of victims is clear and convincing. Here are some excerpts from a report published by the Oslo newspaper VG:

“Several of the youths who were at the Utøya the shooting drama, told VG that they are convinced that there must have been more than one perpetrator. Marius Helander Røset believes the same thing: – I am sure that there was shooting from two different places on the island at the same time, he said.

Witnesses: – There were two people

Police believe Anders Behring Breivik (32) is the perpetrator who was dressed as a policeman , and have charged him for two terrorist attacks. Young people interviewed by VG describe an additional perpetrator – who was not wearing a police uniform. The person was following them around was 180 centimeters tall, had thick dark hair and a Nordic appearance. He had a pistol in his right hand and a rifle on his back. – I believe that there were two people who were shooting, says Alexander Stavdal (23)….

At the press conference Saturday morning opened the police said that there could have been several perpetrators and emphasized that there is an ongoing investigation.”²

The presence of a second shooter is of course most inconvenient for the lone assassin theory, since it represents incontrovertible evidence of a criminal conspiracy, the very thing which the media coverage is usually anxious to avoid. In the Norwegian case, the reports of a second shooter seemed to be persistent enough 36 hours after the main event so as to hold out some hope that the entire official version can be brought down on this particular.

Police Had Drilled Setting off Bombs in Same Area a Few Days Earlier

Another telltale critical sign of a false flag operation is the holding of drills or exercises –allegedly for counterterrorism purposes — by the police or the military at the same time as the terror attack, or shortly before the real terror attack begins. Sometimes, the terror drills or exercises are scheduled to begin slightly after the time when the actual terror attack occurs. In these cases, it is often discovered that the self-styled anti-terror drill or exercise contains a simulated action or event which strongly resembles the real world terror attack, the one which actually kills people. The media will then refer to an astounding coincidence or a weird happenstance, but the reality is that the terror drill has been taken live or flipped live in the form of real killings. The secret is that the legally sanctioned drill has been used to conduit or bootleg the actual butchery through a government bureaucracy whose resources are required to run the terror but in which there are many officials who cannot be allowed to know what is happening.

The Norway events provide a very clear illustration of this principle. In Oslo, a powerful bomb went off in or near the building which houses the office of the Prime Minister. Exactly as we would expect, special anti-terror police had been drilling setting off bombs in a nearby part of the Norwegian capital little more than 48 hours earlier. The public had not been informed in advance, but found out what was happening when they began hearing bombs on Tuesday and Wednesday, whereas the main bomb went off on Friday. Here is a report from the newspaper Aftenposten:

“Armed police were seen in the area around the opera house in Oslo, and violent explosions could be heard over large parts of the city. No one knew that this was all a matter of practice. The Information Section of the Oslo police deeply regrets that the public was not made aware of the seemingly dramatic exercise….It was the emergency squad, the national police special unit against terrorism, which was conducting a drill in the cordoned off area at Bjørvika pier. According to a press release from the police, nearly a day after the exercise, the drill consisted of training in the controlled detonation of explosive charges….The exercise will continue for the rest of Wednesday night and a few more explosions are expected….The exercise followed a familiar pattern for all anti-terror forces around the world: The men lowered themselves down from the ceiling and into through the window that had just been blown out, while they fired hand their weapons.”³

Peter Power of Visor Consultants told BBC Radio Five in the wake of the London subway bombings of July 7, 2005 that his firm had been conducting an exercise based on explosions going off in substantially the same stations of the London underground at the same times when the real explosions had actually occurred. The Norwegian events exhibit the same kind of strange coincidence.

A Motive: Norway Had Decided to Stop Bombing Libya August 1

The targets of the Norwegian terror attacks are all expressly political, including government offices and a summer youth camp of the ruling Labor Party, and thus point in the direction of politics. The government of Norway is currently a coalition composed of the Labor Party, the Socialist Left Party, and the Center Party. Norway has traditionally attempted to cultivate a pro-Arab foreign policy, as seen in its sponsorship of the Oslo peace accords between Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in the mid-1990s. The current government has announced its intention of granting diplomatic recognition to a Palestinian state in the near future. When the destabilization of Libya began last February, the Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of the Labor Party warned Norway’s partners in the NATO alliance against getting involved.

But soon after this, Norway gave in to US pressure and agreed to participate in NATO’s bombing of Libya for an initial period of three months, sending six planes which have carried out an estimated 10% of all the bombing raids mounted by the Atlantic alliance. However, as the end of its three-month commitment had passed, Norway had reduced its contingent to four planes during the month of July, and had announced on June 10 that it was planning to withdraw altogether from the NATO bombing coalition no later than August 1.

The Norwegian decision to drop out of the NATO attack coalition was associated with a similar move by the Netherlands, which was announced on that same day of June 10. The Dutch had decided to maintain their contingent of six planes, but will no longer take part in bombing attacks on ground targets. Henceforth, the Dutch are willing only to help enforce the no-fly zone through air interdiction. There was therefore the potential that Norway’s example could trigger a general tendency by the smaller NATO states to quit the bombing coalition, in which their collective presence is highly significant.

Leading figures of the Norwegian government were among the first to undercut the supposed rationale for the NATO bombing, while urging negotiations: ‘”The solution to the problems in Libya are political, they cannot be solved by military means alone,” Norwegian Prime Minister Stoltenberg told reporters gathered for a conference in Oslo on May 13. “We are very much supporting all efforts to find a political solution to the challenges we are facing in Libya,” he added. Norway’s government …pledged to scale down its role in NATO-orchestrated air strikes on Libya after its current three-month commitment ends on June 24.⁴

This was the policy of the entire Norwegian government: ‘Norway will scale down its fighter jet contribution in Libya from six to four planes and withdraw completely from the NATO-led operation by Aug. 1, the government said Friday…. Defense Minister Grete Faremo said she expects understanding from NATO allies because Norway has a small air force and cannot “maintain a large fighter jet contribution during a long time.” Norway’s air force, meanwhile says its F-16 jets have carried out about 10 percent of the NATO airstrikes in Libya since March 31. The parties in Norway’s center-left coalition government had been at odds over whether to extend the country’s participation, which was scheduled to expire June 24. The most leftist faction in the government, the Socialist Left Party, opposed an extension, but a compromise was reached to stay in the operation until Aug. 1 with fewer planes. “It is wise to end the Norwegian fighter jet contribution. Now Norway should apply its efforts to find a peaceful solution in Libya,” Socialist Left Party lawmaker Baard Vegar Solhjell said.’⁵

State Department Complained of Norway’s “Lack of Commitment” to Libyan Adventure

The Norwegian decision to stop waging war against Libya, the first of its kind by any member of the Atlantic alliance, has attracted the attention of diplomatic observers, one of whom commented that the current government in Oslo has advocated “a distinctly more peaceful approach to global policies by the Norwegian government…. [despite] recent pressure from the US on Norway to contribute more in Libya military campaign. Norway has been resisting that pressure and pushing for a more peaceful approach to the US-led NATO attacks on Libya and refused to provide weapons to NATO, finally announcing last month that Norway would quit its military role in Libya by August 1. In March, as the US was rallying unilateral support to invade Libya, Norway’s minister of foreign affairs Jonas Gahr Støre was one of the few nations to warn the US against armed intervention in Libya. Norway initially supplied six fighter jets for Libya operations and has carried out about 10% of the Libya strikes since 19 March. However, US officials singled out Norway and Denmark for their ‘lack of commitment’ to the mission to oust Gaddafi… Other Norway-Libya links include Norway’s major oil- and fertilizer-related interests in Libya: the Norwegian state-owned Statoil, which has about 30 employees at its Tripoli offices….[Norway’s] businesses have conducted major business operations in Libya, in co-operation with Qaddafi’s regime.”⁶

At the present stage of the inquiry, the best estimate of a motive for the Norwegian attacks is to punish the country for its independent and pro-Arab foreign policy in general, and for its repudiation of the NATO bombing coalition arrayed against Libya in particular.

[...]






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Pyongyang waitresses sliced to perfection

Asia Times, 7/23/11:



BEIJING - A mixed group of Chinese and foreigners recently dined at a North Korean restaurant in the Chinese capital. Surveying the female waitresses, one Chinese guest remarked: "Wow - how beautiful! They all look like models!"

It is a common compliment for female workers at North Korean restaurants, whether in Beijing, Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City or Russia's Vladivostok. The beauties are partly how these restaurants, which dotted around Asia are used as outposts to earn foreign currency for the Pyongyang leadership, attract customers.

South Korea media often tout North Korean women as "natural beauties", comparing them favorably to women in the South who increasingly turn to plastic surgery. However, lately North Korean women seem to be catching up in the surgery stakes, with the North seeing a boom in various operations.

The Daily NK, a North Korea-specific Internet newspaper, reported in May that although facelifts are illegal, state surgeons are increasingly performing cosmetic surgeries in secret in return for bribes. "Upper eyelid surgeries and cosmetic tattoos on eyebrows, lips and the corners of eyes are widespread in North Korea," a source from Pyongyang was quoted as saying.

It reported in the same month that since the start of the 2000s, young women working in North Korean restaurants both in Pyongyang and abroad were required to have the eyelid surgery.

"When I was in Pyongyang last year, I heard from someone related to the North that since the start of the 2000s all waitresses had double eyelid surgery on Kim Jong-il's instructions," a source told the newspaper. "It seems that Kim Jong-il places great importance on the appearance of workers in restaurants earning foreign currency."

[...]




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Bohemian Grove Mystery

.

.

Shoplifting, a multibillion-dollar cultural phenomenon

Carolyn Davis in the Philadelphia Inquirer, 7/20/11:





This multibillion-dollar industry lives and thrives in the shadows, where bags and baggy coats are the tools and practitioners are more likely to get arrested than get rich.

We're talking about shoplifting, also known as the five-finger discount, and now the subject of a new book, The Steal, a Cultural History of Shoplifting, by DePaul University's Rachel Shteir.

"Shoplifting has been a sin, a crime, a confession of sexual repression, a howl of grief, a political yelp, a sign of depression, a badge of identity, and a back door to the American Dream," she writes.

While shoplifting persists in good times and bad, the book's publication resonates in this unforgiving economy that has left so many people without jobs and slammed the front door on their dreams.

Barbara Staib of the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, which offers alternative sentencing programs for offenders, says she saw an uptick in referrals beginning in 2007, when the economy began convulsing. They leveled off last year.

Preliminary findings of the most recent National Retail Security Survey show that unaccounted-for retail merchandise, including losses from clerical errors, employee theft, and shoplifting, rose to $37.14 billion in 2010 or 1.58 percent of retail sales, up from $33.5 billion in 2009, or 1.44 percent of sales.

Shrinkage (an industry term for missing merchandise) amounts globally to $100 billion a year, says Farrokh Abadi, president of Shrink Management Solutions, part of the Philadelphia-based firm Checkpoint Systems.

Thievery is as old as civilization itself.

Eve was goaded into taking that apple. Mythological Greek gods stole to bestow such gifts as fire upon humankind. In Elizabethan England, milliners, booksellers, cheese mongers, and others were victimized by men known as lifters. The Shoplifting Act of 1699 sentenced the thief of an item worth more than five shillings to hanging.

In the mid-1800s, the way Parisian department stores displayed their merchandise nurtured shoplifting as a women's activity. Pockets and bulky clothing accessories with sewn-in linings were favorite - and fashionable - hiding places.

Shoplifting increased in the 1900s, and with it, a lucrative antitheft industry that spurred shoplifters to become more creative, such as using bags with false bottoms and lined in lead to foil security devices. Organized retail-theft crime rings are more threatening, working in teams and targeting not only stores but deliveries of goods, sometimes going after a specific item dictated by the boss.

These days, eBay has even become an unwitting electronic marketplace for stolen goods. The online auction giant now works with law enforcement authorities and chain stores to catch these crooks.

"What's new about shoplifting today is that it has become a cultural phenomenon - a silent epidemic, driven by pretty much everything, in our era," writes Shteir.

The crime's practitioners are a diverse bunch, who do not fit a single profile.

They are unknown and famous - Winona Ryder was preceded in celebrity shoplifting by silver-screen star Hedy Lamarr, former Miss America Bess Myerson, and filmmaker John Waters. They are senior citizens - a Florida program exists to help the elderly deal with criminal charges, the most common of which is shoplifting.

And they are young.

In fact, Staib worries about the number of youths who steal and still think they live ethical lives.

A recent study from the nonprofit Josephson Institute in Los Angeles reported that 33 percent of boys and 25 percent of girls, out of 43,000 high school students surveyed, said they stole from a store in the previous year. Yet to them, shoplifting was not a character flaw: Nearly 90 percent believed that being a good person was more important than being rich. They see stealing as an acceptable way of getting a desired item with low odds of being caught, Staib says.

"It's not just an economic and criminal issue," she says. "It's really more of a sociological issue - how society views it, reacts to it, and inadvertently promotes it."





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#OccupyWallStreet

Adbusters Blog, 13 Jul 2011:

Alright you 90,000 redeemers, rebels and radicals out there, a worldwide shift in revolutionary tactics is underway right now that bodes well for the future. The spirit of this fresh tactic, a fusion of Tahrir with the acampadas of Spain, is captured in this quote:

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona, Spain

The beauty of this new formula, and what makes this novel tactic exciting, is its pragmatic simplicity: we talk to each other in various physical gatherings and virtual people's assemblies … we zero in on what our one demand will be, a demand that awakens the imagination and, if achieved, would propel us toward the radical democracy of the future … and then we go out and seize a square of singular symbolic significance and put our asses on the line to make it happen.

The time has come to deploy this emerging stratagem against the greatest corrupter of our democracy: Wall Street, the financial Gomorrah of America.

On September 17, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up tents, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months. Once there, we shall incessantly repeat one simple demand in a plurality of voices.

Tahrir succeeded in large part because the people of Egypt made a straightforward ultimatum – that Mubarak must go – over and over again until they won. Following this model, what is our equally uncomplicated demand?

The most exciting candidate that we've heard so far is one that gets at the core of why the American political establishment is currently unworthy of being called a democracy: we demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it.


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Hundreds scramble for Dallas County rental vouchers

[Full article]



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The Emperor has no Clothes

Bob Moriarty at 321 Gold, Jul 12, 2011:

I don’t think this is going to come as a great shock to any readers of 321gold but the lamestreet media has done a rotten job of educating the public on the dangers of the current mess in the EU, most notably Greece. The best reporting I have read on what’s going on has come from Pater Tenebrarum of Acting-Man.com. You should go to his site daily, it’s very good.

There are two very important concepts that I want to talk about in this piece. The first is that all loans get paid. ALL LOANS GET PAID. If not by the borrower, then by the lender. Greece is a serial deadbeat. Tax evasion is a national sport. In Athens, taxes have been paid on about 300 swimming pools. Google Earth reveals over 17,000 pools in the city, all owned by people claiming to make less than 35,000 Euros a year.

The EU paid most of the cost for an underground system for the 2004 Olympics. Tickets for the subway are on an honor basis, and most Greeks simply don’t pay. The average wage for workers on the tube is about $100,000; three times the pay in the private sector. The company brings in about $128 million in revenue yearly with costs of $800 million. No wonder the Greeks are in the street rioting, they have a sweet deal going and want the good times to continue.

The EU has already turned over 110 billion Euros and is preparing to dump another 110 billion Euros down into the cesspool that is Greek finance. The money will never be paid back; Greece doesn’t pay their bills. They want the rest of the EU to pay their bills.

The lamestreet media suggests the problems are over for Greece once this latest loan is in place. Nothing could be further from the truth. Greece has done nothing to get their finances in order and they will consume just as long as anyone is dumb enough to hand them money.

The second major point that I want to make is that we focus on taxes collected when we should focus on just how much the government spends. That’s just as true of the US as it is of Greece. Everything any government spends will ultimately become a tax. It can be a direct tax in the form of income taxes or VAT or sales taxes or Corporate income taxes. But the money spent by the government all has to be collected in one form or another. Inflation is a tax, default and destruction of pensions is a tax, excess printing of money is a tax.

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If you don’t want to pay heed to what is going on in Europe, dear reader, you can shift your focus to the US. The US is in worse shape than the Greeks or the EU with five wars going on at the same time and every cent for every war being borrowed.

The US is waging war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Pakistan. I don’t know very many Americans who could even locate them on a map. I don’t know any who could even suggest why we are fighting or what we stand to gain.

The system is crashing right under our eyes and most people can’t see it. Cash up, keep some extra food and water and prepare for the greatest financial debacle in history. The US either defaults or we face a revolution.

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The Great American Carbon Bomb

Bill McKibben at TomDispatch, July 14, 2011:

Will North America Be the New Middle East?
It’s Yes or No For a Climate-Killing Oil Pipeline -- and Obama Gets to Make the Call

The climate problem has moved from the abstract to the very real in the last 18 months. Instead of charts and graphs about what will happen someday, we’ve got real-time video: first Russia burning, then Texas and Arizona on fire. First Pakistan suffered a deluge, then Queensland, Australia, went underwater, and this spring and summer, it’s the Midwest that’s flooding at historic levels.

The year 2010 saw the lowest volume of Arctic ice since scientists started to measure, more rainfall on land than any year in recorded history, and the lowest barometric pressure ever registered in the continental United States. Measured on a planetary scale, 2010 tied 2005 as the warmest year in history. Jeff Masters, probably the world’s most widely read meteorologist, calculated that the year featured the most extreme weather since at least 1816, when a giant volcano blew its top.

Since we’re the volcano now, and likely to keep blowing, here’s his prognosis: “The ever-increasing amounts of heat-trapping gases humans are emitting into the air put tremendous pressure on the climate system to shift to a new, radically different, warmer state, and the extreme weather of 2010-2011 suggests that the transition is already well underway.”

There’s another shift, too, and that’s in the response from climate-change activists. For the first two decades of the global-warming era, the suggested solutions to the problem had been as abstract as the science that went with it: complicated schemes like the Kyoto Protocol, or the cap-and-trade agreement that died in Congress in 2010. These were attempts to solve the problem of climate change via complicated backstage maneuvers and manipulations of prices or regulations. They failed in large part because the fossil-fuel industry managed, at every turn, to dilute or defang them.

Clearly the current Congress is in no mood for real regulation, so -- for the moment anyway -- the complicated planning is being replaced by a simpler rallying cry. When it comes to coal, oil, and natural gas, the new mantra of activists is simple, straightforward, and hard to defang: Keep it in the ground!

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An interesting response at Common Dreams:

Posted by yohocoma

Jul 14 2011 - 5:45pm

McKibben is full of shit with the boundaries he's laying down around this tarsandsaction.org thing. I got an email invite from him for the August "disobedience". It said in part:
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"Earlier in the month, Dan Pfeiffer, the president’s communications director, put it like this: “We WANT you to push us – we absolutely do. The president is someone who comes from a tradition of grassroots organizing, community organizing. A lot of the pushing that you guys are doing on a national level, he did on a local level in Chicago, and he understands that.”

They’re right. If we want the president to do the right thing, we have to push a little. Not in an angry way—many of us will be wearing the Obama buttons we sported during the last election. (If you wore a McCain button, dig that out too!) We’re asking people to be businesslike in dress and demeanor—if you can’t control your emotions, I’d respectfully ask you not to come. We want to show, once and for all, who the radicals are in this fight: (hint--it’s deeply radical to alter the composition of the earth’s atmosphere.)."
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In other words: Don't get angry! Don't act disrespectful! Be "businesslike" (what a creepy fucking paradigm to invoke). Impress the Serious People with your conservative dress, or risk McKibben's disapproval through pursed lips! And perhaps worst of all, McKibben shows that he buys into the fiction that Obama wants to do the right thing, but we simply haven't been pushing the corporate Democrat hard enough.

McKibben has been doing some good things, but this shows he's way out of touch with what needs to be done and where the energy is - ANGER. And it betrays a sadly authority-loving outlook. Not needed in today's world.

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Obama’s “Big Deal”: Wallowing with Pigs in Search of a Grand Center-Right Coalition

Glen Ford at Black Agenda, 07/13/11:

Barack Obama is salivating at the prospect of concluding his Big Deal with the Republicans, the one that will move the center robustly – even transformatively – to the Right, where this president really lives. The debt-limit deadline is Obama’s big chance to panic a significant part of the Democratic Party into joining in the rape of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. “When the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion."

President Obama says he’s determined to make the “big deal” with the Republicans – not like the little, piddling deals he has been cutting all along to benefit the corporate classes, but the BIG deal, the grand consensus he believes he was born to forge with the GOP. Although it’s true that it will take a whopper of a deal to outclass the bipartisan joint venture that transferred $14 trillion to Wall Street, the vast bulk of it on Obama’s watch, the First Black President is nothing if not ambitious. Obama’s Big Deal is actually the coup de grace for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society – relics, like Black activism, standing in the way of a post-everything world.

Obama has been savoring the big moment since last November, when the Republicans seized control of the House and sidelined the president’s main opposition: the left wing of his own party. Delusional Obamites, especially Blacks, are fond of saying their guy really wants Democrats and activists to force him to take a more progressive path – to “make him do it.” It’s actually the other way around. Obama depends strategically on Republicans to “make him do it” – to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock. It is an intricate and intimate dance, with Obama and the GOP moving and grooving to the same music. Obama often gets so caught up, he mouths the Republicans’ lyrics.

“The reason to do Social Security” – by “do,” Obama means “cut” – “is to strengthen Social Security to make sure that those benefits are there for seniors in the out-years,” says Obama, an exact echo of the apocalypse-soon Social Security scare propaganda perfected over the years by the GOP. Obama has been promising to “do” Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid since just before he was sworn into office in January, 2009, when he announced that these entitlements would be “on the table” in his administration. His deficit reduction commission last year did indeed put the programs on the operating table, with Obama’s corporate surgeons tracing dotted lines around the organs to be excised under the irresistible imperatives of austerity – the Republicans’ copyrighted anthem.

“Obama depends strategically on Republicans to push him inexorably rightward with their brinksmanship and constant threats of gridlock.”

Last November 3, I wrote: “The best outcome that could result from Tuesday’s Democratic debacle is that the Republicans overreach and, in their white nationalist triumphalism, make it impossible for President Obama and congressional Democrats to reach an accommodation with rampaging reaction and racism.” In other words, when the debt-limit showdown arrives, pray for gridlock, which would at least mean there is still resistance to Republican extortion.

The showdown is nigh, although Obama is squeezing every Democratic arm and groin in reach to ensure that he and the Republicans are able to walk down the dusty street arm-in-arm at high noon, so that the outcome can be billed as a grand consensus, a Big Deal for Obama. This requires that he gather Democratic accomplices in the gang rape of entitlements. “So we might as well do it now,” says Obama, while people are panicked by the prospect of a technical U.S. “default.” “Pull off the Band-Aid, eat our peas,” he commands, as if the death blow to the last vestiges of the New Deal and the Great Society is just a short, sharp pain, after which the boo-boo will heal just fine.

The real Obama is a cold, cynical bastard. He is not a wimp, but rather, has plenty of spine to face down and brow-beat the remaining defenders of the social safety net in his own Democratic Party, who have always been the most immediate dangers to his grand center-right coalition. But it must be done quickly, quickly, quickly, to capture the debt-limit panic opportunity.

Half or more of the Congressional Black Caucus will do whatever the White House asks of it, will sacrifice anything and everything dear to African American interests in order to preserve this particular Black family in the executive mansion for as long as possible. But many of Obama’s white groupies are facing the fact that they backed a corporate Trojan Horse. Paul Krugman, the columnist for the New York Times, should not have needed a Nobel Prize in economics to realize that Obama “basically shares the GOP’s diagnosis of what ails our economy and what should be done to fix it,” or that the president’s eagerness to gut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid “is something Mr. Obama and those he listens to apparently want for its own sake.”

In other words, this guy works for the other side because that’s where his soul is – if he has one. He advocates policies that serve corporate pigs because he’s one of them. He harms poor people because he is contemptuous of them, just like his Wall Street friends and patrons. His administration is negligent or hostile to Black aspirations for the same reasons as his white business buddies, with whom he shares a worldview. He is every bit as much a war criminal as Bush, and as morally debased.

The last thing we need is to allow this guy to conclude his long-sought Big Deal with the GOP under cover of a debt-limit crisis.

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