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Four Lucasville uprising prisoners on hunger strike

April 11th, 2013, Youngstown, OH- Four prisoners housed at Ohio State Penitentiary began refusing food today. Greg Curry, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Jason Robb and Bomani Shakur, who have been housed at OSP since it opened, are demanding that media outlets be allowed to come for sit-down on-camera interviews with them. In a recorded announcement, Bomani Shakur described the hunger strike as a "protest [of] the state's unfair and unreasonable refusal to grant us access to the media... I am an innocent man. This is injustice, the state of Ohio is trying to kill me."

Numerous news sources have recently contacted the prisoners because of their involvement in the Lucasville Uprising twenty years ago. The hunger strike was timed with the anniversary of the uprising, along with a conference focused on taking another look at what happened in 1993.

People and peace over plutocracy

Remarks for conference on Building Bridges and Creating the Beloved Community, April 13, 2013
Sponsored by Maryland United for Peace and Justice, Maryland United for Peace and Justice

Several years ago a bunch of peace activists were eating in a restaurant in Crawford, Texas, and we noticed George W. Bush. He was actually a cardboard version of George W. Bush like you might get your photo with in front of the White House, but he was almost as lifelike as the real thing. We picked him up and stood him in the corner of the restaurant, facing the corner. We asked him to stay there until he understood what he'd done wrong. For all I know he's still standing there.

"No cuts to Social Security" say Ohio Retirees

Meeting in Columbus, Ohio on 4/9/13, the 300 delegates to the Ohio Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA) greeted the president’s announcement that his proposed budget would propose cuts to Social Security with outrage!

A proposal that Ohio ARA support a petition against the Ryan budget was changed to a petition defending Social Security from any cuts. That resolution was adopted unanimously.

“Nobody likes that Ryan budget,” stated Keith Bailey, IUE retiree from Dayton, “but we aren’t anyone’s pawn. We don’t care who proposes it, if they want to cut the most successful federal program in our nation’s history, that didn’t add one penny to the deficient, then we’ll stand up together and tell them---No Way!”

The resolution opposing any cuts to Social Security also stated that the cap on Social Security taxes, now at $113,000, should be eliminated, so that the wealthy pay their fair share.

San Onofre to Boxer, Markey & the public:

The bitter battle over two stricken southern California reactors has taken a shocking seismic hit.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has ignored critical questions from two powerful members of Congress just as the Government Accountability Office has seriously questioned emergency planning at the San Onofre nuclear plant.

At a cost of some $770 million, Southern California Edison and its partners installed faulty steam generators at San Onofre Units 2 and 3 that have failed and leaked.

Those reactors have been been shut since January, 2012 (similar defects doomed Unit 1 in 1992).

They've generated zero electricity, but SCE and its partners have billed ratepayers over a billion dollars for them.

SCE wants San Onofre reopened by June 1. The idea is to experiment with Unit 2 at 70% of full power for five months, despite widespread concerns that the defective generators will fail again.

That would require a license amendment, about which the NRC staff has asked Edison 32 key preliminary questions. But there’s been no official, adjudicated public hearing on Edison’s response.

Drone World

In the not so distant future, America’s skies will be full of . . . drones.

What could go wrong?

“Although the prospect of drones flying over U.S. cities is generating cries of spies in the skies,” writes the Los Angeles Times, “groups from California to Florida are fiercely competing to become one of six federally designated sites for testing how the remotely piloted aircraft can safely be incorporated into the nation’s airspace.”

It’s just technology and technology is neutral, or so the forces of mainstream capitalism assure us. Drones are an emerging market, with worldwide sales expected to double in the next decade, to $11 billion, if not much more. And these will be good drones, the kind that look for lost children or leaks in pipelines, the kind that catch criminals.

What disturbs me about all this — what feels utterly unexamined in the mainstream coverage of this looming techno-makeover of our world — is:

A. Why is there such an emerging market for drones?

Margaret Thatcher

Time to Bell the Obama Cat

The story goes that some mice became very upset about the cat in the house and convened an emergency meeting. They finally came up with the idea of tying a bell around the cat’s neck, so the dangerous feline could no longer catch victims unawares. The plan gained a lot of enthusiastic praise, until one mouse piped up with a question that preceded a long silence: “Who’s going to bell the cat?”

In recent days, the big cat in the White House has provoked denunciations from groups that have rarely crossed him. They’re upset about his decision to push for cuts in Social Security benefits. “Progressive outrage has reached a boiling point,” the online juggernaut MoveOn declared a few days ago.

Know drones: Jim Leftwich has the Wright and secret stuff

On the front page of the April 7 Sunday New York Times, the paper revealed that there was a secret deal between the military government of Pakistan and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to allow U.S. predator drones to violate the Pakistan’s airspace in exchange for assassinating enemies of their state.

Now Ohio has its own drone secrets. The state’s Development Services Agency is refusing to disclose what Jim Leftwich did as a state employee, claiming that his work for the state is a “trade secret.” Leftwich was paid $114,850 over a 13-month period to lobby the Federal Aviation Agency (FAA) to designate the Dayton-Springfield area as a special testing site for unmanned aerial vehicles.

The Dayton-Springfield corridor has been infamous to critics of the military industrial complex since the end of World War II. Wright Patterson Air Force Base was the site of a well-known foreign technology division that was involved in the reverse engineering of Soviet planes and weapons. Both Wright Patterson and Columbus’ Battelle Memorial Institute employed former Nazi scientists under the covert "Operation Paperclip."

Black Box Voting connects voting machine test lab with kickbacks, bid-rigging, bribery schemes

Next time you hear that voting machines are reliable and safe "because they have been tested and certified," think of this important article, which reveals proven corruption, payoffs and bid-rigging connected to Ciber, Inc., a firm that signed off on our voting machines. Ciber's okay was the foundation for federal acceptance of voting machines all over the USA.

A few weeks ago, I decided to examine electoral fraud from the other end. What happens if we start with known public corruption cases and work backwards to the intersection with elections?

What I found were kickbacks and bid-rigging schemes in New Orleans and Pennsylvania which both connect back to Ciber, the firm that supposedly tested and then signed off on most of the U.S. voting machines currently in use in all fifty states, on behalf of the federal government.

I learned of a now-admittedly corrupt government technology official who had placed, as one of his first priorities, setting up an Internet voting system.

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