Monday, October 1, at 12 noon--Washington Square Park, 1:30pm--March to 250 Broadway

Artist/Activist Mos Def, Idris Elba, Common, Erykah Badu, M1, Talib Kweli, MC Lyte, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Sankofa Community Empowerment, Change the Game, the National Hip Hop Political Convention, The Hip Hop Association, Color of Change and student leaders from over 100 campuses call for a National Student Walk-Out on Monday October 1 at 12 noon to support the Jena 6, who are being denied their human rights by the Louisiana criminal justice system.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Dodging a deadly military crackdown, bloggers in Burma are now on the front lines providing news and photos of death and insurrection.

Their Internet blogs, written in Burmese language and grammatically-flawed English, are mostly by people living in the commercial port of Rangoon, also known as Yangon, where Buddhist monks, pro-democracy activists and residents have been defying security forces during more than a week of protests.

The bloggers rely on word-of-mouth, cell phones, online chat groups, instant messaging, and first-hand experience in barricaded streets amid tear gas and gunfire.

The best blogs provide photos, video and text updates purportedly by eyewitnesses, which are later confirmed by news organizations or, in some cases, can't be verified.

Burma's bloody pro-democracy protests have captivated the outside world, including U.S. President George W. Bush, the United Nations and the public, thanks largely to the bloggers' media.

Letters received yesterday by The Cornucopia Institute, Organic Consumers Association, and the Center for Food Safety from Aurora Organic Dairy, based in Boulder, Colorado, threatened the three public interest groups with a lawsuit if they did not retract statements they had made concerning Aurora and refrain from filing a lawsuit against Aurora alleging consumer fraud.

The legal threats by Aurora are the latest salvo in a media battle stemming from formal legal complaints filed by The Cornucopia Institute in 2005 and 2006 with the USDA over Aurora’s alleged organic management practices. On April 16, 2007, the USDA confirmed Cornucopia's allegations by making administrative findings that the giant industrial-scale dairies, milking thousands of cows each, were not providing their cattle with pasture, as required by law, had illegally brought conventional cattle into their operations, and had committed a number of other serious improprieties.

The most serious finding, resulting from the USDA investigation, was that Aurora sold, labeled, and represented milk as organic when in fact it was not, in "willful violation" of the law.

Jeremy Scahill, author of a terrific book on the Blackwater mercenary army, spoke in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Tuesday to a packed hall.  He took questions at the end, and one man asked something to the effect of "Why does the government want to privatize the military?  We taxpayers have been paying for the Army."  I wished Scahill had pointed out that it's the tax payers who are now paying the private corporations, but the answer Scahill gave was critical. 

"There's a cynical answer and an honest answer," he said, "and I think they're the same answer."  He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn't make campaign "contributions".  But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and give it to private companies, you free it up to come back (some portion of it) to politicians every campaign season.

Scahill has the ability to tell the story of one little corner of corruption and through it provide an understanding of the overall military industrial media congressional complex.  The corner of corruption he focuses on is Blackwater.