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Dictator who sterilized 300,000 women: ‘I Dream of a Peru Without Resentment’

teleSUR | January 6, 2018

Recently pardoned Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, freshly discharged from hospital and living in a luxury mansion, has shared his aspirations for a “Peru without resentment.”

The controversial figure is linked to commanding death squads that carried out disappearances and extrajudicial killings in the war against insurgent groups Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, which claimed at least 70,000 lives.

Fujimori, now 79, also directed the forced sterilization of approximately 300,000 mostly Indigenous women between 1996 and 2000.

He was detained in Chile in 2005 and sentenced in 2009 to 25 years in prison for several crimes, including premeditated murder and kidnapping.

Last week he was discharged from the Centenario clinic, where he had been hospitalized since December 23, just 12 days after being pardoned by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in a controversial move that prompted several cabinet ministers to resign in protest.

Safely ensconced in a US$5,000-a-month mansion in one of Lima’s most exclusive residential districts, Fujimori – now a free man – took to his Twitter account on Saturday to describe the “new phase” of his life.

“In the first hours of this new phase of my life, I would like to share the dreams that constantly invade me,” he posted. “I dream of a Peru without resentment, with everybody working for a superior objective.”

Responding, Fujimori’s supporters said his critics are “blinded by hate” and should learn to forgive and move forward to build a better country.

But others were less forgiving. “Accept responsibility for your cimes, ask the victims for forgiveness, ask the whole nation for forgiveness for running away like a criminal, return the stolen money and then we could talk about it,” posted one Twitter user.

Fujimori’s pardon is believed to be part of a political agreement between his party Popular Force and current President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski.

Protests erupted following Fujimori’s pardon, with widespread calls for it to be rescinded.

Last month a group of 239 renowned Peruvian writers, led by Nobel Prize-winner Mario Vargas Llosa, signed an open letter saying: “Fujimori was convicted of human rights violations and corruption.

“He was responsible for a coup d’état as well as the dismantling of our institutions. His pardon demonstrates the lack of appreciation for the dignity and equality before the law, and the right to memory.”

January 7, 2018 Posted by | Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Argentina: Milagro Sala Gets More Jail Time While Convicted Torturer Gets House Arrest

teleSUR – January 6, 2018

Just hours after 21 simultaneous raids on the home of Argentine Indigenous leader Milagro Sala, a provincial court ordered Friday a one-year extraordinary extension of her pre-trial detention. Sala is 21 days short of serving two years in prison.

The political leader is being investigated for alleged illicit association, fraud and extortion, crimes she was charged with days after being detained for allegedly instigating violence during a protest she didn’t attend.

Sala was initially arrested on Jan. 16, 2016 for an “escrache”, a form of protest that seeks to publicly shame someone by congregating around their homes, against the province governor of Jujuy, an ally of President Mauricio Macri. Shortly after on Jan. 29 of that same year Sala was cleared of the instigation charges, but the judge determined that she would remain in detention over new charges of illicit association, fraud and extortion, which she is currently facing.

According to Sala’s lawyer the main reason for the extension is that her defense presented “innumerable” appeals and nullities. “This lacks sense,” her lawyers contended because “everything presented is within the framework of the right to legal defence.”

The one-year extension is not the first arbitrary decision made by Jujuy’s judiciary. In October 2016, the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention qualified her detention as arbitrary, a decision backed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which urged Argentina’s government to release her.

The Organization of American States and human rights’ groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also demanded her immediate release to no avail.

Milagro Sala is a renowned activist who is seen as President Macri’s first political prisoner. She created the Organization Tupac Amaru, which provides housing and other services to informal workers and popular sectors, she served as an Argentine legislator between 2013 and 2015, and was later elected by the Front for Victory Party, led by former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, to Mercosur’s Parliament.

News of the one-year extension to Sala’s illegitimate imprisonment were accompanied by news of thousands of Argentines protesting the federal ruling that granted house arrest for convicted murderer and torturer Miguel Etchecolatz, who was sentenced to life in prison for crimes against humanity when he worked as a top police officer under the brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s.

He is not the only one. According to Argentina’s Office of Crimes Against Humanity, 549 of people convicted for crimes against humanity in Argentina are currently under house arrest.

Social leaders and opponents of the current right wing government argue that in Macri’s Argentina social and political activists are repressed, prosecuted, and disappeared while those who repress and abuse their power are granted favors.

January 6, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture | , , | Leave a comment

Jacob Hacker Rises Again to Stop Single Payer

By Margaret Flowers | Health Over Profit for Everyone | January 5, 2018

In the American Prospect article linked below, The Road to Medicare for Everyone, Jacob Hacker is once again working to dissuade single payer healthcare supporters from demanding National Improved Medicare for All and use our language to send us down a false path. Once again, he comes up with a scheme to convince people to ask for less and calls those who disagree “purists”. Hacker calls his “Medicare Part E” “daring and doable,” I call it dumb and dumber. Here’s why.

Hacker makes the same assertions we witnessed in August of 2017 when other progressives tried to dissuade single payer supporters.

He starts with “risk aversion,” although he doesn’t use the term in his article. Hacker asserts that those who have health insurance through their employers won’t want to give it up for the new system. Our responses to this are: there is already widespread dislike for the current healthcare system; people don’t like private insurance while there is widespread support across the political spectrum for Medicare and Medicaid; there is also widespread support for single payer; and those with health insurance can be reassured that they will be better off under a single payer system. It is also important to note that employers don’t want to be in the middle of health insurance. Healthcare costs are the biggest complaint by small and medium sized businesses and keep businesses that operate internationally less competitive.

Next, Hacker brings up the costs of the new system and complains that it will create new federal spending. He points to the failures to pass ‘single payer’ in Vermont and California. First, it must be recognized that the state bills were not true single payer bills, and second, states face barriers that the federal government does not, they must balance their budgets. Hacker ignores the numerous studies at the national level, some by the General Accounting Office and the Congressional Budget Office that demonstrate single payer is the best way to save money. Of course there would be an increase in federal spending, the system would be financed through taxes, but the taxes would replace premiums, co-pays and deductibles, which are rising as fast as health insurers can get away with. Hacker proposes a more complex system that will fail to provide the savings needed to cover everyone, the savings that can only exist under a true single payer system.

Hacker also confuses “Medicare for All” with simply expanding Medicare to everyone, including the wasteful private plans under Medicare Advantage. This is not what National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA) advocates support. NIMA would take the national infrastructure created by Medicare and use it for a new system that is comprehensive in coverage, including long term care, and doesn’t require co-pays or deductibles. The system would negotiate reasonable pharmaceutical prices and set prices for services. It would also provide operating budgets for hospitals and other health facilities and use separate capital budgets to make sure that health resources are available where they are needed. And the new system would create a mechanism for negotiation of payment to providers.

Finally, Hacker tries to convince his readers that the opposition to NIMA will be too strong, so we should demand less. We know that the opposition to our lesser demands will also be strong. That was the case in 2009 when people advocated for the ‘public option’ gimmick. If we are going to fight for something, if we are going to take on this opposition, we must fight for something worthwhile, something that will actually solve the healthcare crisis. That something is NIMA. We are well aware that the opposition will be strong, but we also know that when people organize and mobilize, they can win. Every fight for social transformation has been a difficult struggle. We know how to wage these struggles. We have decades of history of successful struggles to guide us.

One gaping hole in Hacker’s approach is that it prevents the social solidarity required to win the fight and to make the solution succeed. Hacker promotes a “Medicare Part E” that some people can buy into. Not only will this forego most of the savings of a single payer system, but it also leaves the public divided. Some people will be in the system and others will be out. This creates vulnerabilities for the opposition to exploit and further divide us. Any difficulties of the new system will be blown out of proportion and those in the system may worry that they are in the wrong place. When we are united in the same system, not only does that create a higher quality system (a lesson we’ve learned from other countries), but it also unites us in fighting to protect and improve that system.

Hacker succeeded in convincing people who support single payer to ask for something less in 2009 and we ended up with a law that is further enriching the health insurance, pharmaceutical and private healthcare institutions enormously while tens of millions of people go without care. Now, Hacker rises again to use the same scare tactics and accusations that he used then to undermine the struggle for NIMA. This is to be expected. The national cry for NIMA is growing and the power holders in both major political parties and their allies in the media and think tanks are afraid of going against the donor class. Social movements have always been told that what they are asking for is impossible, until the tide shifts and it becomes inevitable.

Our task is to shift the tide. We must not be fooled by people like Jacob Hacker. We know that single payer systems work. We have the money to pay for it. We have the framework for a national system and we have the institutions to provide care. Just as we did in 1965 when Medicare and Medicaid were created from scratch, and without the benefit of the Internet, we can create National Improved Medicare for All, a universal system, all at once. Everybody in and nobody out.

We know that we are close to winning when the opposition starts using our language to take us off track. “Medicare Part E” is not National Improved Medicare for All, it is a gimmick to protect the status quo and convince us that we are not powerful. We aren’t falling for it. This is the time to fight harder for NIMA. We will prevail.

Read Jacob Hacker’s article in the American Prospect here.

January 5, 2018 Posted by | Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Israel considering death penalty… but only for Palestinian prisoners

MEMO | January 4, 2018

The Israeli Knesset approved on Wednesday a first reading of the death penalty bill which would allow the authorities to execute Palestinian prisoners accused of taking part in “operations against Israeli targets,” Anadolu has reported. The bill was proposed by the right-wing leader of the Jewish Home party Naftali Bennet; it was approved by a vote of 52 to 49 but needs a second and third reading before it becomes law.

Extremist Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Moldovan-born Defence Minister, endorsed the bill, which he said would increase Israel’s deterrence effect. In televised comments last week, Lieberman said that the law would specifically target Palestinians convicted of attacking Israeli civilians and soldiers.

Last year, at a rally following the death of three Israeli police officers, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu voiced his support for the death penalty for Palestinians, whom he described as “terrorists with blood on their hands.”

Israel applies civilian law to illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Palestinians, however, face military courts and military law. The proposed death penalty would only be applicable in military courts. In the already unlikely event of an Israeli being convicted for killing a Palestinian, the accused would never face the death penalty.

“The fact that Israel lacks a constitution allows its prime ministers to enact legislation that serves the interests of their respective racist governments,” explained Mohammed Dahleh, a Palestinian expert on Israeli affairs. “Israel refuses to adopt a constitution. This also allows it to create laws — or modify them — to suit its expansionist tendencies.”

According to international lawyer Yasser Al-Amouri, the proposed Israeli law violates basic international legal tenets. “The conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis is not criminal in nature but nationalist,” he pointed out. “This means Israel cannot sentence Palestinian prisoners to death under the provision of the Fourth Geneva Convention relating to the treatment of prisoners of war.”

One commentator in London suggested that this legal nicety wouldn’t make any difference. “Israel already treats international laws and conventions with contempt,” said MEMO’s senior editor Ibrahim Hewitt, “so why would it sit up and take notice of this point? The state is guilty of the crime of apartheid, and this bill demonstrates that fact.”

January 4, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

What Do You Call Somebody Who Supports Israel?

Racist

By Stuart Littlewood | American Herald Tribune | January 3, 2018

“If opposing Israel is anti-semitism then what do you call supporting a state that has been engaged in brutal ethnic cleansing for seven decades. What does that make you?” It’s a question posed by Miko Peled, an Israeli Jew and son of an Israeli general, former Israeli soldier and now a leading voice in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. You couldn’t find a more authentic insider.

What else has Peled been saying about Israel?

  • “The name of the game: erasing Palestine, getting rid of the people and de-Arabizing the country…”
  • As for talk about Israel giving up the West Bank for a Palestinian state:  “If it wasn’t so sad it would be funny. It shows a complete misunderstanding of the objective of Zionism and the Zionist state…. By 1993 the Israelis had achieved their mission to make the conquest of the West Bank irreversible.”
  • Peled also describes the Israeli army, in which he served, as “one of the best trained and best equipped and best fed terrorist organisations in the world.”

So let’s repeat Peled’s question. What does supporting Israel make you when Israel has been busy ethnically cleansing the native Palestinians for seven decades? What should we call people who defend the indefensible?… who admire the despicable?… who applaud the expulsion at gunpoint of peaceable civilians and the confiscation of their homes and land?

Give them a name, one that will stick.

The claim by Conservative Friends of Israel that 80 percent of the party’s MPs and MEPs are members is alarming and reveals how lacking in integrity we are at the heart of government. It puts us almost on a par with US Congress which is almost totally controlled by the Israel lobby through AIPAC.

Being a Friend of Israel, of course, means embracing the whole rotten kit and caboodle, including the terror and racism on which the state of Israel was built. It means embracing the dispossession and oppression of innocent Palestinians. It means embracing the discriminatory laws against those who remain n their homeland. It means embracing the jackboot thuggery that abducts civilians — including children — and imprisons and tortures them without trial. It means embracing the theft and annexation of Palestinian land and water resources, the imposition of hundreds of military checkpoints, severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods, and maximum interference with Palestinian life at every level.

It means approving the bloodbaths inflicted by Israel on Gaza and feeling comfortable with blowing hundreds of children to smithereens, maiming thousands more, trashing vital infrastructure such as hospitals, schools, power plants and clean water supplies, and causing $6bn of devastation that will take 20 years to rebuild. And, by the way, where is the money coming from?

It means embracing the strangulation of the West Bank’s economy and the vicious ten-year blockade on Gaza. It means embracing the denial of Palestinians’ right to self-determination and return to their homes. It means embracing the religious war that humiliates Muslims and Christians and prevents them from visiting their holy places. It means endorsing a situation in which hard-pressed American and British taxpayers are having to subsidise Israel’s illegal occupation of the Holy Land.

And if, after all that, you are still Israel’s special friend, where is your self-respect?

It is ludicrous that a foreign military power which has no regard for international law and rejects weapons conventions and safeguards can exert such influence on foreign policy in the US and UK. Pandering to Israel has been immensely costly in blood and treasure and stupidly damaging to our reputation.

Everyone outside the Westminster/Washington bubble knows perfectly well that there can be no peace in the Holy Land without justice. In other words no peace until the occupation ends. Everyone knows that international law and countless UN resolutions still wait to be enforced. Everyone knows that Israel won’t comply unless sanctions are imposed. Everyone knows that the siege on Gaza won’t be lifted until warships are sent.

What’s more, everyone now knows that the US is not an honest broker, Israel wants to keep the pot boiling and justice won’t come from more sham ‘negotiations’. Nor will peace. Everyone knows who is the real cause of turmoil in the Middle East. And everyone knows that Her Majesty’s Government’s hand-wringing and empty words serve no purpose except to prolong the daily misery for Palestinians and buy time for Israel to complete its criminal scheme to make the occupation permanent.

Churchgoing British prime minister Theresa May praises Israel for being “a thriving democracy, a beacon of tolerance” when it is obviously neither. It’s an obnoxious ethnocracy. She says our two countries share “common values” when we obviously don’t — although her rotten party probably does.

Given the Israeli regime’s endless crimes against humanity and cruelty to the rightful inhabitants of the Holy Land her remarks are insulting to anyone who lives by Christian values. She even claims that Israel is a country where people of all religions “are free and equal in the eyes of the law” and “Israel guarantees the rights of people of all religions, races and sexualities, and it wants to enable everyone to flourish”. Her ignorance in these matters rivals Trump’s.

And May would do well to call off her efforts to ciminalise the successful BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign, which is a grass-roots civil society based resistance movement. She warns that her government will “have no truck with those who subscribe to it”.  But Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights bestows on everyone “the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers”. So she boobs even on that.

In an interview with Jonas Alexis, Miko Peled sounds upbeat about BDS. As long as Israel has a blank check [cheque] from the US and the UK and is undefeatable militarily and diplomatically, BDS “is possibly the only positive change one can point to at this time.”

Many of us have urged beefing up BDS, extending its reach and orchestrating its efforts globally. There seems no other way to force the spineless international community to finally impose the sanctions they should have slapped on Israel decades ago.

It has got to the point where I wouldn’t mind seeing individuals among the political élites targeted by BDS if they deserve it. And many of them surely do.

January 4, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Leave a comment

Macron vows to tighten media control because ‘fake news threatens democracy’

RT | January 4, 2018

France’s media watchdog will be given broader powers in 2018 to combat the “fake news” phenomenon which threatens democracy, President Emmanuel Macron promised during a New Year’s address to the press corps Wednesday.

“I have decided that we will change our legal system to protect [our] democratic life from this ‘fake news,” Macron said at the Elysee Palace in Paris. “During the election period, on the internet, content will no longer have exactly the same rules,” he added.

Macron described ‘fake news’ as a threat to democracy due to it “fostering doubt and forging alternative realities which allows people to say that the media and politicians are always more or less deceptive.”

“If we want to protect liberal democracies, we must have strong legislation,” the French president said. The new law will see the role of France’s media watchdog, CAS, expanded in order to deal with attempts to destabilize the situation in the country by broadcasters “controlled or influenced by foreign states,” he said. CAS will be granted the right to refuse, suspend or cancel agreements with such broadcasters based on their content, including online publications, the president said.

The anti-fake news legislation will target social media in particular, making online platforms more transparent on their sponsored content. It will also allow specific content or entire websites to be taken down should there be violations, the French head of state said, promising the new law will come into force this year.

While Macron didn’t mention any names this time, he particularly singled out RT and Sputnik throughout his election campaign and presidency, repeatedly slandering the Russian outlets as “deceitful propaganda” entities and accusing both of spreading “disinformation” about him. He barred RT journalists from his campaign headquarters without a valid reason, and later denied access to the Elysee Palace to a producer of RT’s Ruptly video agency. “I have always had an exemplary relationship with foreign journalists, but they have to be real journalists,” Macron told RT France head Xenia Fedorova during a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Versailles in May.

French news outlets, however, are concerned about Macron’s push to control the media. In the summer, unions representing journalists from more than 20 outlets, including AFP, BFMTV, Liberation and Le Monde, released statements saying “the new government has chosen to pressure” media outlets.

RT launched its French-language channel, RT France, in mid-December, consistent with it’s mandate of shedding light on issues and points of view that have traditionally been ignored by the mainstream media.

Read more:

RT launches new French-language channel

Élysée Palace blocks RT’s Ruptly video agency from Macron-May meeting

January 4, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance | , | Leave a comment

Expect Even Less Freedom of Internet in 2018

By Philip M. GIRALDI | Strategic Culture Foundation | 04.01.2018

Users of social media have been increasingly reporting that their accounts have been either censored, blocked or suspended during the past year. Initially, some believed that the incidents might be technical in nature, with overloaded servers struggling to keep up with the large and growing number of accounts, but it eventually emerged that the interference was deliberate and was focused on individuals and groups that were involved in political or social activities considered to be controversial.

At the end of last year a number of Russian accounts on Facebook and elsewhere were suspended over the allegations that social media had been used to spread so-called false news that had possibly materially affected the 2016 presidential election in the United States. Even though it proved impossible to demonstrate that the relatively innocuous Russian efforts had any impact in comparison to the huge investment in advertising and propaganda engaged in by the two major parties, social media quickly responded to the negative publicity.

Now it has been learned that major social media and internet service providers have, throughout the past year, been meeting secretly with the United States and Israeli governments to remove content as well as ban account holders from their sites. The United States and Israel have no legal right to tell private companies what to do but it is clearly understood that the two governments can make things very difficult for those service providers that do not fall in line. Israel has threatened to limit access to sites like Facebook or to ban it altogether while the U.S. Justice Department can use terrorist legislation, even if implausible, to force compliance. Washington recently forced Facebook to cancel the account of the Chechen Republic’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, a Putin loyalist that the White House has recently “sanctioned.”

Israel is not surprisingly most active in patrolling the Internet as it is keen to keep out any material sympathetic to the Palestinian cause or critical of Israeli treatment of Arabs. Its security services scan the stories being surfaced and go to the service providers to ask that material be deleted or blocked based on the questionable proposition that it constitutes “incitement” to violence. Facebook reportedly cooperates 95% of the time to delete material or shut down accounts. Palestinian groups, which use social networking on the internet to communicate, have been especially hard hit, with ten leading administrators’ accounts being removed in 2017. Israeli accounts including material threatening to kill Arabs are not censored.

Microsoft, Google, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are all also under pressure to cooperate with pro-Israel private groups in the United States, to include the powerful Anti-Defamation League (ADL). The ADL seeks “to engineer new solutions to stop cyberhate” by blocking “hate language,” which includes any criticism of Israel that might even implausibly be construed as anti-Semitism. Expanding restrictions on what is being defined as “hate speech” will undoubtedly become common in social media and more generally all across the internet in 2018.

The internet, widely seen as a highway where everyone could communicate and share ideas freely, is actually a toll road that is increasingly managed by a group of very large corporations that, when acting in unison, control what is seen and not seen. Search engines already are set up to prioritize information from paid “sponsors,” which come up prominently but often have nothing to do with what material is most relevant. And the role of intrusive governments in dictating to Facebook and other sites who will be heard and who will be silenced should also be troubling, as it means that information that would benefit the public might never be seen, particularly if it is embarrassing to powerful interests. And speaking of powerful interests, groups like the ADL with partisan agendas will undoubtedly be able to dictate norms of behavior to the service providers, leading to still more loss of content and relevancy for those who are looking for information.

All things considered, the year 2018 will be a rough one for those who are struggling to maintain the internet as a source of relatively free information. Governments and interest groups have seen the threat posed by such liberty and are reacting to it. They will do their best to bring it under control.

January 4, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

As US seeks emergency UN meeting on Iran, Russia reminds it of Ferguson & Occupy crackdowns

RT | January 4, 2018

The US has said it will call an emergency UNSC meeting to discuss the unrest in Iran, citing the need to support the protesters. Moscow says the move is hypocritical, given Washington’s own history of cracking down on protests.

While the US envoy to the UN, Nikki Haley, said Washington would call for an “urgent” UN Security Council (UNSC) meeting on Iran Monday, there’s been no word yet from the UN on such a meeting being scheduled. Kairat Umarov, Kazakhstan’s envoy to the UN, who is now holding the rotating presidency in the UNSC, said Tuesday the council has not yet added Iran to its agenda and no decision has been yet taken on the issue.

Haley was emphatic in her support of Iran’s anti-government protesters, praising their “great bravery” and calling on the international community to support them. “The people of Iran are crying out for freedom,” Haley told journalists at a news conference. “All freedom-loving people must stand with their cause,” she added, while promising to seek an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Commission.

Washington’s latest attempt at masquerading as a global human rights defender was met with ridicule in Moscow, which reminded the US about its own approach when dealing with protests whenever they occur on American soil. “There is no doubt that the US delegation to the UN has something to tell the world,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova said on Facebook.

“Haley can, for example, share the US experience of putting down protests, tell [the Security Council] about the mass arrests and crackdown against the Occupy Wall Street movement or about the “clean-up operation” in Fergusson,” she sarcastically added.

The Occupy Wall Street protests began in the world’s financial capital, New York City, in September 2011. People came to Zuccotti Park located in the Wall Street financial district to protest against social and economic inequality in the US. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the police crackdown was swift, arresting as many as 700 protesters in one day as they marched across Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. Later, it was also revealed that the FBI monitored the movement through its Joint Terrorism Task Force and used counterterrorism agents to investigate OWS, despite labelling it peaceful.

Fergusson, Missouri, witnessed massive protests in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man who was shot and killed by a police officer. US authorities imposed a curfew in the area while military police repeatedly dispersed the protesters using tear gas and other means. Later, the Missouri governor deployed National Guard troops to secure the area.

January 4, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , , | Leave a comment

A Tale of Two Americas: Where the Rich Get Richer and the Poor Go to Jail

By John W. Whitehead | The Rutherford Institute | January 3, 2018

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” ― Nelson Mandela

This is the tale of two Americas, where the rich get richer and the poor go to jail.

Aided and abetted by the likes of Attorney General Jeff Sessions—a man who wouldn’t recognize the Constitution if it smacked him in the face—the American dream has become the American scheme: the rich are getting richer and more powerful, while anyone who doesn’t belong to the power elite gets poorer and more powerless to do anything about the nation’s steady slide towards fascism, authoritarianism and a profit-driven police state.

Not content to merely pander to law enforcement and add to its military largesse with weaponry and equipment designed for war, Sessions has made a concerted effort to expand the police state’s power to search, strip, seize, raid, steal from, arrest and jail Americans for any infraction, no matter how insignificant.

Now Sessions has given state courts the green light to resume their practice of jailing individuals who are unable to pay the hefty fines imposed by the American police state. In doing so, Sessions has once again shown himself to be not only a shill for the Deep State but an enemy of the people.

First, some background on debtors’ prisons, which jail people who cannot afford to pay the exorbitant fines imposed on them by courts and other government agencies.

Congress banned debtors’ prisons in 1833.

In 1983, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the practice to be unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause.

“Despite prior attempts on the federal level and across the country to prevent the profound injustice of locking people in cages because they are too poor to pay a debt,” concludes The Atlantic, “the practice persists every day.”

Where things began to change, according to The Marshall Project, was with the rise of “mass incarceration.” As attorney Alec Karakatsanis stated, “In the 1970s and 1980s, we started to imprison more people for lesser crimes. In the process, we were lowering our standards for what constituted an offense deserving of imprisonment, and, more broadly, we were losing our sense of how serious, how truly serious, it is to incarcerate. If we can imprison for possession of marijuana, why can’t we imprison for not paying back a loan?”

By the late 1980s and early 90s, “there was a dramatic increase in the number of statutes listing a prison term as a possible sentence for failure to repay criminal-justice debt.” During the 2000s, the courts started cashing in big-time “by using the threat of jail time – established in those statutes – to squeeze cash out of small-time debtors.”

Fast-forward to the present day which finds us saddled with not only profit-driven private prisons and a prison-industrial complex but also, as investigative reporter Eli Hager notes, “the birth of a new brand of ‘offender-funded’ justice [which] has created a market for private probation companies. Purporting to save taxpayer dollars, these outfits force the offenders themselves to foot the bill for parole, reentry, drug rehab, electronic monitoring, and other services (some of which are not even assigned by a judge). When the offenders can’t pay for all of this, they may be jailed – even if they have already served their time for the offense.”

Follow the money trail. It always points the way.

Whether you’re talking about the government’s war on terrorism, the war on drugs, or some other phantom danger dreamed up by enterprising bureaucrats, there is always a profit-incentive involved.

The same goes for the war on crime.

At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

Sessions’ latest gambit plays right into the hands of those who make a profit by jailing Americans.

Sharnalle Mitchell was one such victim of a system for whom the plight of the average American is measured in dollars and cents. As the Harvard Law Review recounts:

On January 26, 2014, Sharnalle Mitchell was with her children in Montgomery, Alabama when police showed up at her home to arrest her. Mitchell was not accused of a crime. Instead, the police came to her home because she had not fully paid a traffic ticket from 2010. The single mother was handcuffed in front of her children (aged one and four) and taken to jail. She was ordered to either pay $2,800 or sit her debt out in jail at a rate of fifty dollars a day for fifty-nine days. Unable to pay, Mitchell wrote out the numbers one to fifty-eight on the back of her court documents and began counting days.

This is not justice.

This is yet another example of how greed and profit-incentives have not only perverted policing in America but have corrupted the entire criminal justice system.

As the Harvard Law Review concludes:

[A]s policing becomes a way to generate revenue, police start to “see the people they’re supposed to be serving not as citizens with rights, but as potential sources of revenue, as lawbreakers to be caught.” This approach creates a fugitive underclass on the run from police not to hide illicit activity but to avoid arrest for debt or seizure of their purportedly suspicious assets… In turn, communities … begin to see police not as trusted partners but as an occupying army constantly harassing them to raise money to pay their salaries and buy new weapons. This needs to end.

Unfortunately, the criminal justice system has been operating as a for-profit enterprise for years now, covertly padding its pockets through penalty-riddled programs aimed at maximizing revenue rather than ensuring public safety.

All of those seemingly hard-working police officers and code-enforcement officers and truancy officers and traffic cops handing out ticket after ticket after ticket: they’re not working to make your communities safer—they’ve got quotas to fill.

Same goes for the courts, which have come to rely on fines, fees and exorbitant late penalties as a means of increased revenue. The power of these courts, magnified in recent years through the introduction of specialty courts beyond your run-of-the-mill traffic court (drug court, homeless court, veterans court, mental health court, criminal court, teen court, gambling court, prostitution court, community court, domestic violence court, truancy court), is “reshaping the American legal system—with little oversight,” concludes the Boston Globe.

And for those who can’t afford to pay the court fines heaped on top of the penalties ($302 for jaywalking, $531 for an overgrown yard, or $120 for arriving a few minutes late to court), there’s probation (managed by profit-run companies that tack on their own fees, which are often more than double the original fine) or jail time (run by profit-run companies that charge inmates for everything from food and housing to phone calls at outrageous markups), which only adds to the financial burdens of those already unable to navigate a costly carceral state.

“When bail is set unreasonably high, people are behind bars only because they are poor,” stated former Attorney General Loretta Lynch. “Not because they’re a danger or a flight risk — only because they are poor. They don’t have money to get out of jail, and they certainly don’t have money to flee anywhere. Other people who do have the means can avoid the system, setting inequality in place from the beginning.”

In “Policing and Profit,” the Harvard Law Review documents in chilling detail the criminal justice system’s efforts to turn a profit at the expense of those who can least afford to pay, thereby entrapping them in a cycle of debt that starts with one minor infraction:

In the late 1980s, Missouri became one of the first states to let private companies purchase the probation systems of local governments. In these arrangements, municipalities impose debt on individuals through criminal proceedings and then sell this debt to private businesses, which pad the debt with fees and interest. This debt can stem from fines for offenses as minor as rolling through a stop sign or failing to enroll in the right trash collection service. In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail. If an arrestee owes fines in more than one of St. Louis County’s eighty-one municipal courts, they are passed from one jail to another to await hearings in each town.

Ask yourself this: at a time when crime rates across the country remain at historic lows (despite Sessions’ inaccurate claims to the contrary), why does the prison population continue to grow?

The prison population continues to grow because of a glut of laws that criminalize activities that should certainly not be outlawed, let alone result in jail time. Overcriminalization continues to plague the country because of legislators who work hand-in-hand with corporations to adopt laws that favor the corporate balance sheet. And when it comes to incarceration, the corporate balance sheet weighs heavily in favor of locking up more individuals in government-run and private prisons.

As Time reports, “The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the two major players in this game—the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group—invest heavily in lobbying for punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.”

It’s a vicious cycle that grows more vicious by the day.

According to The Atlantic, “America spends $80 billion a year incarcerating 2.4 million people.” But the costs don’t end there. “When someone goes to prison, nearly 65 percent of families are suddenly unable to pay for basic needs such as food and housing… About 70 percent of those families are caring for children under the age of 18.”

Then there are the marked-up costs levied against the inmate by private companies that provide services and products to government prisons. Cereal and soup for five times the market price. $15 for a short phone call.

The Center for Public Integrity found that “prison bankers collect tens of millions of dollars every year from inmates’ families in fees for basic financial services. To make payments, some forego medical care, skip utility bills and limit contact with their imprisoned relatives… Inmates earn as little as 12 cents per hour in many places, wages that have not increased for decades. The prices they pay for goods to meet their basic needs continue to increase.”

Worse, as human rights attorney Jessica Jackson points out, “the fines and fees system has turned local governments into the equivalent of predatory lenders.” For instance, Jackson cites:

Washington state charges a 12% interest rate on all its criminal debt. Florida adds a 40% fee that goes into the pockets of a private collections agency. In California, penalties can raise a $100 fine to $490, or $815 if the initial deadline is missed. A $500 traffic ticket can actually cost $1,953, even if it is paid on time. And so we are left with countless tales of lives ruined—people living paycheck to paycheck who cannot afford a minor fine, and so face ballooning penalties, increasing amounts owed, a suspended license, jail time, and being fired from their jobs or unable to find work.

This isn’t the American Dream I grew up believing in.

This certainly isn’t the American Dream my parents and grandparents and those before them worked and fought and sacrificed to achieve.

This is a cold, calculated system of profit and losses.

Now you can shrug all of this away as a consequence of committing a crime, but that just doesn’t cut it. Especially not when average Americans are being jailed for such so-called crimes as eating SpaghettiOs (police mistook them for methamphetamine), not wearing a seatbelt, littering, jaywalking, having homemade soap (police mistook the soap for cocaine), profanity, spitting on the ground, farting, loitering and twerking.

There is no room in the American police state for self-righteousness. Not when we are all guilty until proven innocent.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is no longer a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

It is fast becoming a government “of the rich, by the elite, for the corporations,” and its rise to power is predicated on shackling the American taxpayer to a debtors’ prison guarded by a phalanx of politicians, bureaucrats and militarized police with no hope of parole and no chance for escape.

ABOUT JOHN W. WHITEHEAD

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks, 2015) is available online at http://www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.

January 3, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Facebook ‘Routinely’ Blocking Accounts at US, Israel’s Requests – Giraldi

Sputnik – January 2, 2018

Facebook and other Silicon Valley firms choose to comply with the requests of Washington and Tel Aviv to delete undesired accounts because they fear US and Israeli influential political elites, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, has told Sputnik, adding that the practice, which he described as “illegal,” has become routine.

Glenn Greenwald’s article is completely accurate, Philip Giraldi, a former counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer at the CIA, told Sputnik, commenting on the Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist’s recent op-ed which shed light on Facebook’s controversial practice of blocking accounts of individuals at the request of the US and Israeli governments.

“The blocking of accounts of people who are on lists maintained by the US government has become routine,” Giraldi said. “It is also illegal as the account holders have broken no laws and are in compliance with the rules set up by the sites themselves.”

Greenwald raised the alarm over the supposed state censorship exercised by the social networking service against Palestinian activists and Russian officials.

Citing Al Jazeera and The New York Times, the investigative journalist emphasized the alleged mutual consent reached by the Israeli government and Facebook which resulted in the closure of numerous accounts and pages of Palestinian individuals and media outlets deemed as “inciting violence.”

“That means that Israeli officials have virtually unfettered control over a key communications forum of Palestinians,” Greenwald concluded, suggesting that at the same time “calls by Israelis for the killing of Palestinians are commonplace on Facebook, and largely remain undisturbed.”

According to the journalist, Facebook’s decision to close the account of Ramzan Kadyrov, the leader of the Chechen Republic, Russia, is similarly “disturbing and dangerous.” Greenwald highlighted that while the social media service claims that “Mr. Kadyrov’s [Facebook and Instagram] accounts were deactivated because he had just been added to a United States sanctions list and that the company was legally obligated to act,” Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro remains active on both platforms despite the fact he is on the same sanctions list.

“Does anyone trust the Trump administration — or any other government — to compel social media platforms to delete and block anyone it wants to be silenced?” Greenwald asked rhetorically.

The CIA veteran says that there is nothing new in what the investigative journalist is describing: “Those of us in the activist community have long been observing how some articles have been blocked or made to disappear.”

“Israel and Jewish groups in the United States have led discussions with Facebook, Google and other sites to restrict what they choose to describe as hate speech. They have been successful, obtaining the agreement of those companies to set up standards that will in effect limit any criticisms of Israel and permit criticism of the Palestinians and other Arabs,” Giraldi explained.

He noted that “the companies can, in fact, do what they want as they are private entities. However, “if the public begins to understand that they are cooperating with governments to censor their product it will hurt their bottom lines as advertisers will go elsewhere,” he pointed out.

Commenting on what is behind the Silicon Valley giant’s apparent pliability to Washington and Tel Aviv, the ex-CIA officer opined that “the companies for the most part go along with Israel and the US government because they are fearful that the US government will intervene to regulate the system.”

“In the case of Israel, they fear lawsuits from Israel’s many and powerful friends in the United States,” Giraldi suggested.

Regardless of Donald Trump’s assuming office, the United States government has been doing much of the same since the time of the Obama administration, the former intelligence official underscored.

January 2, 2018 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli army arrests Palestinian parliamentarian Nasser Abdel Gawad

MEMO | January 1, 2018

The Israeli army arrested a Palestinian parliamentarian in the West Bank city of Salfit this morning, according to a report by Anadolu Agency.

According to eyewitnesses, the Israeli forces raided Nasser Abdel Gawad’s residence and arrested him.

Palestinian MP Fathi al-Qaraawi of the Hamas-affiliated Change and Reform bloc said continuous arrests of deputies of the Palestinian Legislative Council who are entitled to parliamentary immunity is a flagrant violation of international law.

“Israel rejected the results of the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006 and arrested all Hamas deputies (in the West Bank including Jerusalem) and continues to punish the Palestinian people for this by arresting the group’s deputies,” al-Qaraawi said.

The Change and Reform bloc won the 2006 Palestinian elections with an overwhelming majority.

Al-Qaraawi added the arrest is an attempt to block opposition to US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The latest arrest raises the number of jailed Palestinian parliamentarians to 11.

January 1, 2018 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

Peaceful Protests Constitutional Right of Iranians – President Rouhani

© Sputnik/ Aleksey Nikolskyi
Sputnik – 31.12.2017

Protests and criticism, not involving violence, are the constitutional rights of the Iranians, the country’s President Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday.

Since Thursday, Iran has been rocked by the largest protests over the past years. Thousands have been protesting across Iran against poverty and unemployment. The protesters have been chanting slogans, criticizing Rouhani and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Earlier in the day, Tehran’s mayor Mohammad Ali Najafi said that traffic in some part of the city had been disrupted due to the rallies, adding that some municipal properties, including a number of bus stations, suffered damages during the protests.

“Protest, criticism constitutional rights of people… Criticism different from violence, inflicting damage on public properties,” Rouhani said as quoted by Iranian Press TV broadcaster in the outlet’s Twitter post.

The protests have been suppressed in Iran’s second most populous city of Mashhad by the authorities who used tear gas against the demonstrators.

Earlier on Sunday, authorities of the country’s western Lorestan province confirmed that two people had died during the protests in the province. The local authorities added, however, that the security forces had not opened fire at protesters.

Officials from several countries, including UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, have expressed concerns over the rallies in Iran, calling on the country’s authorities to ensure the citizens’ right to peaceful demonstration.

December 31, 2017 Posted by | Civil Liberties | , | Leave a comment

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