Image by k.l.macke via FlickrChuck Norris is no pinko-liberal-commie, and Human Events is a very conservative publication. The two have come together to produce one of the most important articles of our time, “Obama’s US Assassination Program.”
It seems only yesterday that Americans, or those interested in their civil liberties, were shocked that the Bush regime so flagrantly violated the FlSA law against spying on American citizens without a warrant. A federal judge serving on the FISA court even resigned in protest to the illegality of the spying.
Nothing was done about it. “National security” placed the president and executive branch above the law of the land. Civil libertarians worried that the US government was freeing its power from the constraints of law, but no one else seemed to care.
Encouraged by its success in breaking the law, the executive branch early this year announced that the Obama regime has given itself the right to murder Americans abroad if such Americans are considered a “threat.” “Threat” was not defined and, thus, a death sentence would be issued by a subjective decision of an unaccountable official.
Most Americans will respond that the “indispensable” US government would never confuse an American exercising First Amendment rights with a terrorist or an enemy of the state. But, in fact, governments always have. Even one of our Founding Fathers, John Adams and the Federalist Party, had their “Alien and Sedition Acts” which targeted the Republican press.
Few with power can brook opposition or criticism, especially when it is a simple matter for those with power to sweep away constraints upon their power in the name of “national security.” Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan recently explained that more steps are being taken, because of the growing number of Americans who have been “captivated by extremist ideology or causes.” Notice that this phrasing goes beyond concern with Muslim terrorists.
In pursuit of hegemony over both the world and its own subjects, the US government is shutting down the First Amendment and turning criticism of the government into an act of “domestic extremism,” a capital crime punishable by execution, just as it was in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia.
September 11 destroyed more than lives, World Trade Center buildings, and Americans’ sense of invulnerability. The event destroyed American liberty, the rule of law and the US Constitution.
Why our agricultural empire will fall
The Romans, the Mesopotamians ( Iraq ) and the medieval Europeans, for example, all had agricultural systems that, much like ours, were yoked to complex technology and highly specialized trade networks. And each of those societies eventually failed because they hadn't accounted for soil erosion, growing overpopulation and weather changes. Climate change, anyone?
Fraser and Rimas propose no easy solutions, advocating instead that we learn to store surplus food, live locally, farm organically and diversify our crops.
Salon spoke to Evan Fraser over the phone about agricultural patterns through history, the instability of our food system, and whether the solutions he proposes are ultimately unaffordable for the world's poor.
David Kirby on "The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy and Poultry Farms on Humans and the Environment"
The theory is that when you poison a chicken, it gets sick, so it eats and drinks more, consumes more, to try to get the poison out of its body. That makes a chicken grow faster, and it prevents intestinal parasites. The risk to humans, there have been studies done, and they have found residue of arsenic in some chickens. The real threat is in the litter that comes out the other end of the chicken. When that gets spread on farmland, people breathe in that arsenic dust. And there’s a town in Arkansas where cancer rates are just through the roof. There’s been over twenty pediatric cases in this tiny town of Prairie Grove with just a couple of thousand people.
...
my book is not really about animals, and it’s not even just about animal poop, although there’s a lot of poop in the book. It’s about the people who live near these farms, who have seen their communities overturned and, in times, destroyed, seen the water polluted, the air polluted, people like Rick Dove, who is a—comes from a very conservative Republic background. He’s a former Marine, retired colonel, a retired Marine, a JAG, moved his family to the Neuse River, which is a beautiful river in North Carolina, pristine. And then the hog factories came in, and the river started to die. This dinoflagellates called Pfiesteria started to appear. Rick was trying to operate a fishing business, and all of a sudden the fish were showing up dead with open sores on their sides. And the fishermen themselves were getting disoriented from the toxins being released by this protozoa. And Rick took it upon himself to—he went up in the air and saw these hog factories. And he’s still fighting them. He works with the Waterkeeper Alliance. And they are successfully suing a chicken company, Perdue, and a chicken grower in Maryland, and they’re suing some of the polluting hog farms down in North Carolina.
.....I
f we reduce antibiotic use in these factory farms, if we reduce the amount of subsidies they were getting, it would level the playing field between the big operators and the small operators. It’s the processing plants that are the final blockade. We have so few of them now that it’s harder for independent producers to get their products to market. But the other problem is, because we have so few processing plants and they’re so huge, that when you have a contamination issue like this, then all of a sudden tons—hundreds of thousands of tons of food is contaminated.
Mass Assassinations Lie at the Heart of America's Military Strategy in the Muslim World
The U.S. has conducted assassination programs in the Third World for decades, but the actual killing -- though directed and financed by the C.I.A. -- has been largely left to local paramilitary and police forces. This has now has changed dramatically.
What is unprecedented today is the vast number of Americans directly assassinating Muslims -- through greatly expanded U.S. military Special Operations teams, U.S. drone strikes and private espionage networks run by former CIA assassins and torturers. Most significant is the expanding geographic scope of their killing. While CENTCOM Commander from October 2008 until July 2010, General Petraeus received secret and unprecedented permission to unilaterally engage in operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, former Russian Republics, Yemen, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, the Horn of Africa, and wherever else he deems necessary.
Never before has a nation unleashed so many assassins in so many foreign nations around the world (9,000 Special Operationssoldiers are based in Iraq and Afghanistan alone) as well as implemented a policy that can be best described as unprecedented, remote-control, large-scale "mechanized assassination." As the N.Y. Times noted in December 2009: "For the first time in history, a civilian intelligence agency is using robots to carry out a military mission, selecting people for killing in a country where the United States is not officially at war."
This combination of human and technological murder amounts to a worldwide “Assassination Inc.” that is unique in human affairs.
Nov 3,2009
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiations continue in a few hours as Seoul, Korea plays host to the latest round of talks. The governments have posted the meeting agenda, which unsurprisingly focuses on the issue of Internet enforcement [UPDATE 11/4: Post on discussions for day two of ACTA talks, including the criminal enforcement provisions][UPDATE 11/5: Post on discussions for day three on transparency]. The United States has drafted the chapter under enormous secrecy, with selected groups granted access under strict non-disclosure agreements and other countries (including Canada) given physical, watermarked copies designed to guard against leaks.Despite the efforts to combat leaks, information on the Internet chapter has begun to emerge (just as they did with the other elements of the treaty). [Update 11/6: Source document now posted] Sources say that the draft text, modeled on the U.S.-South Korea free trade agreement, focuses on following five issues:
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