Last week an international tribunal ended an extensive investigation and trial into the torture allegations brought against the Bush administration. It concluded that the Bush torture team Addington, Yoo, Haynes, Bybee, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush is guilty of war crimes..

Most Americans heard nothing about this.

via Bush torture team found guilty – Steven Rockford – Open Salon.

The entire modern conservative movement consists of an ongoing attempt to sever the relationship of a self-governing people to their government, to break down the concept of a political commonwealth. Many of the conservative attempts to wedge people apart through the use of an Other to be feared and despised — whether that was black people, or empowered women, or immigrants, or gay people — have been framed to attack the government’s attempts to ameliorate discrimination against the groups in question. In modern conservative thought, then, and in the mindset it seeks to ingrain on the people of the country, the government is the ultimate Other.

In doing so, the corporate masters of the conservative movement are good with all of this because they seek a wary, frightened and insecure people. Those people are too cowed to make waves, too spooked to assert their rights as citizens, too confused to demand accountability. That huge local bank in the middle of your town is chopped up into office space. If any part of it is still a bank, it’s owned by a megabank based in New York, where things are being done to your money that you won’t even know about until the registered letters from the bank start showing up in the mail. Or maybe there isn’t a bank there at all. Just an ATM cut into the great sandstone wall of the place.

via The Post Office Is Not an Other. The Post Office Is Us. By Charles P. Pierce – Esquire.

For the past two years most policy makers in Europe and many politicians and pundits in America have been in thrall to a destructive economic doctrine. According to this doctrine, governments should respond to a severely depressed economy not the way the textbooks say they should — by spending more to offset falling private demand — but with fiscal austerity, slashing spending in an effort to balance their budgets.

Critics warned from the beginning that austerity in the face of depression would only make that depression worse. But the “austerians” insisted that the reverse would happen. Why? Confidence! “Confidence-inspiring policies will foster and not hamper economic recovery,” declared Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the European Central Bank — a claim echoed by Republicans in Congress here. Or as I put it way back when, the idea was that the confidence fairy would come in and reward policy makers for their fiscal virtue.

The good news is that many influential people are finally admitting that the confidence fairy was a myth. The bad news is that despite this admission there seems to be little prospect of a near-term course change either in Europe or here in America, where we never fully embraced the doctrine, but have, nonetheless, had de facto austerity in the form of huge spending and employment cuts at the state and local level.

via Death of a Fairy Tale – NYTimes.com.

Thsi is about Greece – but much of it could just as easily be about the US.

Were one to write a pre-election analysis in the glorious days of Greece’s ancien regime, one would most probably have to present and analyse the political positions of the main competing parties. Yet, this is one of the most outdated things one might want to do if one intends to say anything useful about Greece today. In fact, no-one expects to learn anything new from the traditionally televised debates among politicians (no doubt that this disillusionment should be regarded as one positive outcome of the “crisis”). Alas, there are still many hopes regarding the outcome of the elections.

The old anarchist slogan that inspired this article’s title has gained urgent actuality in Greece. Spray-painted with black and red letters on random walls throughout the urban landscape, its bold message stands in alarming contrast to the empty utterances by the talking heads now standing for election.

For a long time, the most insightful and inspiring quotes about the political situation in Greece have totally eclipsed the manifestos of technocrats and the reports of journalists. Hope and insights, endurance and critique, are more likely to be expressed through red and black graffiti than in the speeches made by experts.

The “Greek crisis” has had at least two side effects so far: it demonstrated that official politics has no vision whatsoever, and that mainstream journalism has no shame.

via If elections could change things, they’d be illegal – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.

“What happened to you?” I asked.

“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”

“Again?” someone said.

We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.

“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

via David Graeber: New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors « naked capitalism.

What would you do if you came across someone on the street that had not had anything to eat for several days? Would you give that person some food? Well, the next time you get that impulse you might want to check if it is still legal to feed the homeless where you live. Sadly, feeding the homeless has been banned in major cities all over America. Other cities that have not banned it outright have put so many requirements on those that want to feed the homeless (acquiring expensive permits, taking food preparation courses, etc.) that feeding the homeless has become “out of reach” for most average people. Some cities are doing these things because they are concerned about the “health risks” of the food being distributed by ordinary “do-gooders”. Other cities are passing these laws because they do not want homeless people congregating in city centers where they know that they will be fed. But at a time when poverty and government dependence are soaring to unprecedented levels, is it really a good idea to ban people from helping those that are hurting?

This is just another example that shows that our country is being taken over by control freaks. There seems to be this idea out there that it is the job of the government to take care of everyone and that nobody else should even try.

But do we really want to have a nation where you have to get the permission of the government before you do good to your fellow man?

via Feeding The Homeless BANNED In Major Cities All Over America.

The United States was spending untold billions of dollars every month to rule Iraq, and yet at most every turn it seemed that it was making the wrong decision. Many people I knew who studied the US presence or spent time working in Iraq, did feel that the US was simply “that incompetent”.

But based on my experience in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and discussions with colleagues who worked in Central Asia and Africa, I came to believe that the seeming incompetence was a mask for the deliberate sowing of chaos by governments in order to profit – whether strategically, or even more often quite literally monetarily – from instability and confusion.

Making this dynamic even more attractive was the privatisation of security, military and intelligence activities that became a hallmark of the Bush wars. To put it simply, there was little coin in competence. Much of the so-called war on terror has been run on a “cost-plus” basis (that is, profit was added onto whatever the supposed “expenses” were, regardless of how over budget they ran). Incompetence and its twins corruption and cronyism paid extremely well, whether you were an Iraqi official or an American contractor.

via Stratfor and geopolitical instruments of our demise – Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

“This is probably the most fundamental assault on our sovereignty that we have experienced if it proceeds down the tracks that the US is proposing,” she told me last week.

“This is because it will tie the hands of New Zealand Government in the kind of policy choices they can make for the indefinite future on areas that range from schemes for medicines, ownership of privatised state assets, the internet and the rules that govern that, to plain packaging for tobacco and a whole range of things that have nothing to do with what people think of as trade.

“The added assault on sovereignty and democracy in that process is that the negotiations are secret, aside from the leaks of text that we have had. The nine countries involved in the negotiations have said that none of the documents aside from the final version of the text will be available for another four years, whether the negotiations are concluded or collapse, which means we cannot hold our Governments to account.”

via The TPP and what it could mean for you – JamesMurraysBlog – National – 3 News.

It is one thing to convince farmers to use artificial seeds for the purposes of enriching their lives, it is quite another to manipulate nature and technology to profit from them.

The irony is GM seeds have not been effective in India and the consequences are not as rosy as what Monsanto had promised to deliver. Scathing reports of the mass suicides of Indian farmers broke out as recently as three years ago when scores of farmers took their own lives in order to escape the burden of high prices and the failure of Monsanto’s GM seeds.

Monsanto offered its GM seeds to the farmers of India with hopes of reaping plentiful crops. Mostly uneducated farmers thought Monsanto had come to provide a “magic” formula that would transform their lives. They had no idea what was coming.

Monsanto’s seeds in India did not produce what the company had promised and farmers hoped. The expensive seeds piled up debts and destroyed farming fields. In many instances, the crops simply failed to materialize. The farmers were not aware that the GM seeds require more water than the traditional seeds. Lack of rain in many parts of India exacerbated the crop failure.

With no harvest, the farmers could not pay back the lenders. Burdened with debts and humiliation, the farmers simply took their own lives, some by swallowing poisonous pesticides in front of their families. To date, an estimated 125,000 farmers have committed suicide all over India.

via Monsanto’s Ill-Effects In India – OpEd.

It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock. A staple of GOP politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America’s enemies (both real and imagined), being afraid to use violence, and subordinating US security to international bodies and leftwing conceptions of civil liberties.

But how can a GOP candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush’s terrorism policies; waged a war against government whistleblowers as part of a campaign of obsessive secrecy; led efforts to overturn a global ban on cluster bombs; extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Reflecting this difficulty for the GOP field is the fact that former Bush officials, including Dick Cheney, have taken to lavishing Obama with public praise for continuing his predecessor’s once-controversial terrorism polices. In the last GOP foreign policy debate, the leading candidates found themselves issuing recommendations on the most contentious foreign policy question (Iran) that perfectly tracked what Obama is already doing, while issuing ringing endorsements of the president when asked about one of his most controversial civil liberties assaults (the due-process-free assassination of the American-Yemeni cleric Anwar Awlaki). Indeed, when it comes to the foreign policy and civil liberties values Democrats spent the Bush years claiming to defend, the only candidate in either party now touting them is the libertarian Ron Paul, who vehemently condemns Obama’s policies of drone killings without oversight, covert wars, whistleblower persecutions, and civil liberties assaults in the name of terrorism.

via Vote Obama – if you want a centrist Republican for US president | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | The Guardian.