Chicago police state, May 20, 2012. Top: Cops line the streets prior to the start of anti-NATO demonstration. Bottom: Protester bloodied by police baton.
Photos: World Must Wake Up
The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.
Securing permission to use these “signature strikes” would allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior, such as imagery showing militants gathering at known al-Qaeda compounds or unloading explosives.
If approved, the change would probably accelerate a campaign of U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that is already on a record pace, with at least eight attacks in the past four months.
The Brotherhood’s new position on economic policy has delighted the United States. US lawmakers have pushed hard since the beginning of the uprising to foster a form of political Islam compatible with US economic interests and the ideology of the Washington Consensus. When Senators John Kerry and John McCain opened the Egyptian Stock Exchange in a made-for-TV moment last June, it was clear to all that the US would seek - in a characteristically cynical move - to hijack the cries for freedom echoing from Tahrir Square in order to promote the “freedom” of deregulated market capitalism.
Some of the most extreme neoliberal measures have been directed at Egypt’s agriculture sector. As a condition for development aid, USAid has required Egypt to shift its formidable agricultural capacity away from staple foods and toward export crops such as cotton, grapes and strawberries in order to generate foreign currency to pay off its burgeoning debt to the US.
According to Columbia University professor, Timothy Mitchell, USAid first began to facilitate this process in the 1980s through its Agricultural Mechanisation Project, which was designed to develop the productive capacity of Egyptian export agriculture by financing the purchase of American machinery.
In the end - despite USAid’s projections to the contrary - the programme did very little to help common farmers. Instead, it disproportionately benefitted the few large landholders who could afford to take out the loans, while slashing the demand for agricultural labour and causing rural wages to plummet.
To propel the transformation to export-led agriculture, USAid forced the Egyptian government to heavily tax the production of staples by local farmers and to eliminate subsidies on essential consumer goods like sugar, cooking oil and dairy products in order to make room for competition from American and other foreign companies.
To ameliorate the resulting food gap, USAid’s so-called “Food for Peace” programme provided billions of dollars of loans for Egypt to import subsidised grain from the US, which only further undercut local farmers. The result of all of this “agricultural reform” was an unprecedented spike in food prices which made livelihoods increasingly precarious and forced much of the workforce to accept degrading and dehumanising labour conditions. The widespread social frustrations that resulted from these reforms helped spark the 2011 uprising.
Similar forms of neoliberal shock therapy been applied to the public services sector. USAid has aggressively pushed for so-called “cost-recovery” mechanisms, a euphemism for transforming public healthcare and education into private, fee-based institutions. Indeed, USAid typically spends nearly half of its health and education budgets - more than $100-million per year - on privatisation measures.
This has been fantastic for multinational medical companies, as it translates into greater dependence on imported drugs and equipment. For Egyptians, however, privatisation means having to pay large sums on healthcare and education. Mitchell shows that such expenditures - as a percentage of household income - now rank at the second and third highest in the world, respectively.
To make matters worse, Mitchell also demonstrates that USAidís cuts to public service budgets have forced the wage rates of workers in hospitals and schools below the rate of inflation, causing deep income deficits among working-class households.
These destructive, pro-corporate policies get obscured by the rhetoric that USAid deploys. According to its website, USAid claims to have helped Egypt become a “success story in economic development”, citing “improvements” in the quality of education and - amazingly - “the administration of justice” (a shocking contradiction, given that the US actively funded Mubarak’s repressive military apparatus and its widespread human rights abuses).
Source: Jazeera
I strongly agree with the last comment on this thread
socialistictendencies:occupyallstreets:
Documents Show NYPD Infiltrated Liberal Groups Nationwide
Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities.
The infiltration echoes the tactics the NYPD used in the run-up to New York’s 2004 Republican National Convention, when police monitored church groups, anti-war organizations and environmental advocates nationwide. That effort was revealed by The New York Times in 2007 and in an ongoing federal civil rights lawsuit over how the NYPD treated convention protesters.
Police said the pre-convention spying was necessary to prepare for the huge, raucous crowds that were headed to the city. But documents obtained by The Associated Press show that the police department’s intelligence unit continued to keep close watch on political groups in 2008, long after the convention had passed.
The document provides the latest example of how, in the name of “fighting terrorism,” law enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that legally oppose government policies. The FBI, for instance, has collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, might indicate support for violent militias — an assertion for which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups.
By contrast, at the height of the Occupy Wall Street protests and in related protests in other cities, officials at the U.S. Homeland Security Department repeatedly urged authorities not to produce intelligence reports based simply on protest activities.
“Occupy Wall Street-type protesters mostly are engaged in constitutionally protected activity,” department officials wrote in documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the website Gawker. “We maintain our longstanding position that DHS should not report on activities when the basis for reporting is political speech.”
At the NYPD, the monitoring was carried out by the Intelligence Division, a squad that operates with nearly no outside oversight and is so secretive that police said even its organizational chart is too sensitive to publish. The division has been the subject of a series of Associated Press articles that illustrated how the NYPD monitored Muslim neighborhoods, catalogued people who prayed at mosques and eavesdropped on sermons.
Revolting pieces of bloody dog shit.
IF YOU ARE STILL A COP YOU ARE NOT ONE OF THE GOOD ONES.
(via socialuprooting)
We Need Tumblr’s Help With Removing Mayor Bloomberg From Office
Mayor Bloomberg has just banned all food donations to all homeless shelters in NYC. He claims this is to protect them from fatty food but Bloomberg has never been an advocate for the poor.
If that wasn’t enough, Bloomberg also try to create a policy that would make homeless people prove they had no where else to go to be accepted into a shelter. Fortunately, a judge struck down on the decision.
Homelessness in NYC is at a record high. 113,553 different people slept in municipal homeless shelters in 2010. That is up 9 percent from the previous year and up 39 percent from 2002 when Bloomberg took office.
Maybe the reason why homelessness is so high in NYC is because Bloomberg is out of touch with the middle class. Michael Bloomberg is the 11th richest person in America and the 20th richest person in the world. His wealth has multiplied more than 5 times since he took office.
Bloomberg’s incredible wealth allowed him to change term limit laws in NYC so he can run for a third consecutive term.
Mayor Bloomberg has never been a stranger to controversy. Since taking office, more than 4 million innocents have been stopped and frisked by NYPD. The vast majority are black and Latino (87% of all stops & frisks).
NYPD has also been spying on Muslim neighborhoods with direct orders from Bloomberg. They have sent undercover officers into churches to collect data on innocents and eavesdropped in cafes.
It was revealed yesterday that the NYPD has also been infiltrating liberal groups such as anti-war protesters and peace demonstrators.
Michael Bloomberg has a long history of corruption dating back from 2002 when he first took office. He has no respect for the middle class and needs to resign immediately.
Sign The Petition Telling Mayor Mike Bloomberg To Resign or Face A Recall
Anti-War Protesters Again Denied Permit For NATO Summit March
A judge on Thursday rejected a request from anti-war protesters to demonstrate during the NATO summit of world leaders in May, but organizers said they would protest anyway and hope to draw 10,000 people or more opposed to war in Afghanistan.
“I can say definitively we are marching on May 20. We will hold a peaceful protest,” leader Andy Thayer said. He said organizers would get together to decide whether to appeal to a higher court.
Anti-war protesters want to march on May 20 and frustrated by the city’s refusal to allow a march that day. Activists have warned there could be a confrontation such as that during the anti-Vietnam War protests at the Democratic convention in 1968, which has marred Chicago’s image ever since.
The judge’s ruling on Thursday agreed with the city of Chicago, which had earlier denied the permit after a hearing at which city officials said the march would clog traffic and over-tax police resources.
The city had granted protesters a permit to hold a virtually identical rally and march on the day before, May 19, which coincided with a scheduled G8 summit prior to the NATO meeting. But the G8 summit was shifted to Camp David, near Washington, and Chicago protesters asked to move their demonstration a day later.
“Common sense tells you the city said it had enough resources to approve our application for May 19, when it had two summits. Now they say they don’t have enough personnel. It totally defies logic,” Thayer said.
A city spokesman could not immediately be reached for comment.
Everyone should know about this by now. If they don’t… here’s the reblog?
thepoliticalnotebook:
Shaima Alawadi, a 32-year-old Iraqi woman living in Southern California, was taken off life support today, succumbing to injuries sustained in a brutal tire iron beating on Wednesday. Shaima was found in her living room, and according to her daughter Fatima and the police investigating, a note was found near her saying “Go back to your country, you terrorist.”
Shaima was a mother of five who has been in the US with her family since the mid-1990s. She was described by her friend Sura Alzaidy as “respectful modest muhajiba.” Her daughter tearfully addressed her mother’s attackers during a media interview, saying “You took my mother away from me. You took my best friend away from me. Why? Why did you do it?”
[Daily Mail; AFP]
[H/T: thatsassyarab]
(via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
— Kitty Lui via Facebook (via fuckyeahmarxismleninism)
Terrifying
Our government’s deliberate and premeditated killing of American terrorism suspects raises profound questions that ought to be the subject of public debate. Unfortunately the Obama administration has released very little information about the practice — its official position is that the targeted killing program is a state secret — and some of the information it has released has been misleading.
Our suit overlaps with the one recently filed by The New York Times insofar as it seeks the legal memos on which the targeted killing program is based. But our suit is broader. We’re seeking, in addition to the legal memos, the government’s evidentiary basis for strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen in the fall of 2011. We’re also seeking information about the process by which the administration adds Americans to secret government “kill lists.” We think it’s crucial that the administration release the legal memos, but we don’t think the memos alone will allow the public to evaluate the lawfulness and wisdom of the program.
We know something about the fall 2011 strikes from media reports. On September 30, the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) jointly carried out the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in New Mexico, using missiles fired from unmanned drones in Yemen. A second U.S. citizen, Samir Khan, was killed in the same attack. Two weeks later, Anwar al-Awlaki’s son, Abdulrahman, a 16-year-old U.S. citizen born in Colorado, was killed in another U.S. drone strike elsewhere in Yemen. The administration has not adequately explained the legal basis for these strikes, and it has not explained the factual basis, either.
Soon after the fall 2011 strikes, we submitted a FOIA request to the CIA, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice (DOJ). Three months later, we have yet to receive a single document in response. Outrageously, the CIA and the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel responded by refusing to confirm or deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to our request. Essentially, these agencies are saying the targeted killing program is so secret that they can’t even acknowledge that it exists.
(Source: socialuprooting)
The Dictator and The Zionist - The Trouble with Sacha Baron Cohen.
This morning, Sacha Baron Cohen is on my mind. Not...
this is a picture of the protest—southwestern students...
The Obama Administration attempted to censor the internet several times before, I call bullshit. Btw, Obama said he would veto the NDAA...
Recently, Congresswoman Virginia Foxx raised eyebrows when she expressed her lack of sympathy for those who are currently drowning in student debt....
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
