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The new CHAOS, COINTELPRO and the Occupy movement

As activists and journalists debate whether Homeland Security and the CIA are actively involved in the recent domestic crackdown on the Occupy movement, evidence mounts that the progressive populist movement is being targeted by COINTELPRO style repressive tactics.

Four of the seven Occupy Columbus activists who were arrested on November 15 appeared at pre-trial before a Franklin County municipal judge on Thursday, January 5, 2012. The four had pled not guilty after being charged with “negligent trespassing” for entering the lobby of a US Bank. The activists were touring Columbus banks to inquire about their banking policies. Two of the Occupy activists have pled guilty to a minor misdemeanor trespass charge, and one has not entered a plea.

At the January 5 hearing, the four turned down a plea deal from the prosecutors and received a continuance. They will reappear for another scheduled pre-trial on February 9.

At this moment the four appear ready for a full blown trial that may possibly reveal ties between federal and local police authorities regarding surveillance of the Occupy movement.

2012 is the year to finally bury nuke power

The year 2012 has opened with news that Fukushima's radioactive cloud may already have killed some 14,000 Americans, according to a major study just published in the International Journal of Health Services.

Some 100 million tons of tsunami trash---much of it radiated by Fukushima fallout---has begun contaminating the beaches of our west coast.

Germany and Japan, the world's third and fourth largest economies, along with numerous others countries, have definitively turned away from the "Peaceful Atom."

But it hasn't yet been buried. That's up to us. And 2012 is the year to do it.

We are already very close. The mythical "Nuclear Renaissance" has been gutted by Fukushima, low gas prices and the escalating Solartopian revolution in green energy. Solar panels, wind turbines, sustainable bio-fuels, geo-thermal, ocean thermal, increased efficiency and much more have simply priced atomic energy out of the market.

My New Year's resolutions

Exercise. Lose weight. Be nicer. Work with not just this year but many future years and generations and centuries in mind.

Work with an international perspective as much as possible. Collaborate internationally as much as possible.

Work to turn last year's Arab Spring into this year's Worldwide Spring-Summer-Fall-Winter.

Help to create a worldwide movement against plutocracy and violence.

Stop thinking of defeating horrendous proposals as the only kind of "victory" possible.

Within the United States, help to advance the organization of a student loan debtors union large enough and strategic enough to both refuse payment and to build a campaign that will make education free going forward — in the United States and around the world.

Help to advance a nonviolent resistance campaign to halt foreclosures on homes, one by one, and through legislatures and courts.

Obama from reality

Stop picking on the poor plutocrats

I stopped by a corporate chain bookstore this week and checked out the "Current Affairs" section. I was a little surprised to discover that according to a dozen or more books dominating the display we are all under a vicious life-and-death assault from a raving, drooling mob of communist devils led by that well-known pinko guerrilla Barack Obama.

Of course, further investigation tends to reveal that the crimes of this mythical nouveau-Soviet assault by Democrats in D.C. are a combination of tasks performed for their masters on Wall Street and tasks they would never perform even under enhanced interrogation technique. The Obama-gang of rabid leftists stands accused of bailing out banksters and mega corporations, as of course they have eagerly done, just as have their Republican partners in crime. And they stand accused of taxing the rich and cutting the military while providing healthcare, education, retirement security, renewable energy, and affordable housing to the least well-off among us, as of course they will do the day Newt Gingrich turns monogamous.

Book Review: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Whereas most traditional historical narratives say that Jim Crow was dismantled by the modern day civil rights movement, Michelle Alexander argues otherwise in The New Jim Crow. She posits that the denial of citizenship for African Americas was the plan of the Founding Fathers, and subsequent generations of Americans have found new ways to ensure the survival of that plan. The mass incarceration of black men is the current chosen method by which America continues this practice; indeed, Alexander says it has become the “new racial caste system.”

Has America's stolen election process finally hit prime time?

It took two stolen US Presidential elections and the prospect of another one coming up in 2012.
For years the Democratic Party and even much of the left press has reacted with scorn for those who've reported on it.
But the imperial fraud that has utterly corrupted our electoral process seems finally to be dawning on a broadening core of the American electorate---if it can still be called that.

The shift is highlighted by three major developments:
1. The NAACP goes to the United Nations

In early December, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights organization in America, announced that it was petitioning the United Nations over the orchestrated GOP attack on black and Latino voters.

In its landmark report entitled Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America, the NAACP directly takes on the new Jim Crow tactics passed in fourteen states that are designed to keep minorities from voting in 2012.

Extraordinary interview: In love with tortured man -- Indefinite imprisonment, torture, terror inside California prisons through eyes of woman of courage

When Kendra Castaneda’s beloved faced torture in solitary confinement, his beloved, a regular, Californian suburban, young woman would have never guessed that only nine months later, she would be an Examiner.com “Inspiring Americans Award” nominee for courageously sparking human rights hope for 100,000 secretly tortured people in the United States prison industrial complex, up to 6,000 in California alone, all horribly abused in solitary confinement, indefinitely, as the National Defence Authorization Act 2012 codifies.

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Copyright Deborah Dupré 2011. All Rights Reserved.

If you care about Keystone and climate change, occupy Exxon

It seemed like the afterthought in the payroll tax cut extension fight, a small consolation prize to the Republicans on what should have been the easiest of bi-partisan votes. But the two-month clock is now ticking on whether Obama will approve the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s environmentally disastrous tar sands. If we want him to make the right decision and deny the permit, maybe it’s time to Occupy Exxon, with creative protests at local Exxon/Mobil stations. Of course we need to keep pressuring Obama. The bill’s deadline precludes anything close to the kind of comprehensive environmental review that he called for after rallies and civil disobedience at the White House led him to delay approval for a year. But why not also go after the oil companies whose influence led the Republicans to hold the rest of the unemployment and payroll tax bill hostage to the fast-track requirement. Exxon/Mobil has long been the dirtiest of the dirty among these companies. This makes them a logical target.

Palestine: Those who inspired us in 2011

Mustafa Tamimi was a 28-year-old resident of the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. His meticulously trimmed beard served as the centerpiece of his handsome face.

In December 2009, when an Israeli soldier shot him from a short distance with a tear gas canister, half of Mustafa's face went missing. More soldiers laughed as his horrified family tried to accompany him to a nearby hospital, according to activists present at the scene. Only the mother was finally able to obtain a special permit from the Israeli military, which allowed her to be with her son.

Mustafa's crime? He, along with Palestinian, Israeli and international peace activists, protested the besiegement of Nabi Saleh by the illegal Jewish settlement of Halamish. Halamish has existed since 1977 and drastically grown in size and population ever since, taking over privately-owned Palestinian land. As of late, Nabi Saleh has been struggling for mere survival as its fresh water spring has also been seized by settlers under the watchful eye of the Israeli army.

Mustafa died so that the village of Nabi Saleh could live. The struggle will continue for years.

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