A new US Army report finds the rate of suicide by soldiers in the Army has risen above the civilian rate for the first time since Vietnam. We talk to the parents of two soldiers who committed suicide: Gregg Keesling, the father of Chancellor Keesling, a US soldier who took his own life on June 19, 2009, while on his second tour of duty in Iraq, and Kevin and Joyce Lucey, whose son Jeffrey Lucey took his own life on June 22, 2004, after returning home from military duty in Iraq. They’re still waiting for letters of condolence from President Obama. [includes rush transcript]

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/6/with_military_suicides_on_the_rise

By Sarah Irani, EcoSalon
Posted on August 15, 2009, Printed on August 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/141959/

The Golden Arches: the ultimate American icon. Super Size Me taught us that fast food culture brings obesity, heart disease, hypertension and a whole slew of other problems. How bad do you really want that Big Mac? Here are 15 reasons you’ll never let anyone you love get near those Golden Arches.

1. Real food is perishable. With time, it begins to decay. It’s a natural process, it just happens. Beef will rot, bread will mold. But what about a McDonald’s burger? Karen Hanrahan saved a McDonald’s burger from 1996 and, oddly enough, it looks just as “appetizing” and “fresh” as a burger you might buy today. Is this real food?

2. You would have to walk 7 hours straight to burn off a Super Sized Coke, fries and Big Mac. Even indulging in fast food as an occasional treat is a recipe for weight gain…unless you’re planning to hit each treadmill in the treadmill bay afterwards.

3. Containing less fat, salt and sugar, your pet’s food may be healthier than what they serve at McDonald’s.

4. In 2007, the employees of an Orlando-area McDonald’s were caught on camera pouring milk into the milkshake machine out of a bucket labeled “Soiled Towels Only.” That particular restaurant had already been cited for 12 different sanitary violations. Though McDonald’s proudly stands by its safety standards, and not every restaurant has such notorious incidents, the setting of a fast food restaurant staffed with low-paid employees at a high turnover rate arguably encourages bending the rules. (McDonald’s isn’t alone in this, of course – Burger King is actually ranked as the dirtiest of all the fast food chains.)

5. McDonald’s supports the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Much of the soy-based animal feed used to fatten fast-food chickens is grown in the Amazon. Are those chicken nuggets really worth acres of irreplaceable trees? (Especially considering how important carbon sinks like the rainforest are to halt global warming!) Fast food supports a completely unsustainable system of agriculture. It’s cruel to animals, unhealthy for humans, and bad for the planet.

6. Even Prince Charles, while touring a diabetes center in the United Arab Emirates, commented that banning McDonald’s is key to health and nutrition. Don’t let the salads and chicken breasts fool you. The “chicken” at McDonald’s, by the way, comes with a whole lot more than chicken.

7. As if feeding children high-fat, high-sodium, low-nutrition “food” weren’t bad enough, some Happy Meals in 2006 contained toy Hummers. It’s as if McDonald’s was encouraging a whole generation of kids not only to guzzle food, but to guzzle gas as well. Would you like a few barrels of petroleum with that?

8. The processed fat in McDonald’s food (and other fast food) promotes endothelial dysfunction for up to 5 hours after eating the meal. Endothelial tissue is what lines the inside of blood vessels.

9. For those who enjoy sex, take note: erectile dysfunction is connected to endothelial dysfunction. Morgan Spurlock of Super Size Me commented that his normally healthy sexual function deteriorated in just one month when he ate only food from McDonald’s. Even his girlfriend commented on camera that “he’s having a hard time, you know, getting it up.”

10. How many cows does it take to keep the world loaded with Big Macs? I had to do a some research and a little math, but according to a brief video inside one of McDonald’s 6 meat processing plants, about 500,000 pounds of beef is processed per day, per plant. If an average beef cow weighs 1,150 pounds, that means 2609 cows a day are turned into burgers. That’s 952,285 cows per year. And that’s just in the United States. Eating a hamburger may not be worse than driving a Hummer, but it’s bad. One hamburger patty does not necessarily come from one cow. Think about that. You’re eating bits of hundreds of cows.

11. Maybe you just pop in for an inexpensive latte. Watch out for the caramel syrup (Sugar, water, fructose, natural (plant source) and artificial flavor, salt, caramel color (with sulfites), potassium sorbate (preservative), citric acid, malic acid) or the chocolate drizzle (Corn syrup, water, hydrogenated coconut oil, high fructose corn syrup, glycerin, nonfat milk, cocoa, cocoa (processed with alkali), food starch-modified, disodium phosphate, potassium sorbate (preservative), xanthan gum, artificial flavor (vanillin), salt, soy lecithin). Please don’t put that stuff into your body. Eat healthy cheap food instead – you can be well and still save cash.

12. Are you a vegetarian with a French fry craving? You better skip McDonald’s because their fries actually contain milk (and wheat) and though they’re fried in vegetable oil, the oil is flavored with beef extract. (McDonald’s famously misled customers for years.)

13. Do you want high blood pressure? Hit the drive-through. Eating a McDonald’s chicken sandwich (any of “˜em, take your pick) will give you about 2/3 of the recommended daily amount of sodium. And if you actually do have high blood pressure, that’s way more than you really need.

14. Finally unveiled: the secret of the Big Mac’s “secret sauce.”

Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

Yum. Cheap oil and cheap syrup. Many people depend upon cheap food such as the sort offered at McDonald’s, whether due to the economic conditions we currently face or low incomes. So shouldn’t we be examining regulations that subsidize corn syrup but consider fruits and vegetables – the building blocks of a healthy body and green planet – to be “speciality” crops? Shouldn’t we be promoting urban gardening, community gardens and spreading information about low-cost farmers’ markets and CSAs? And focusing on the abundant choices of cheap food that are tasty and green?

15. Still not convinced? Maybe this 1970s trip through McDonaldland will give you enough nightmares to keep your loved ones away forever.

© 2009 EcoSalon All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/141959/

The 44th president of the United States was elected amid hopes that he would roll back his country’s global dominance. Today, he is commander-in-chief of an unprecedented network of military bases that is still expanding.

by Catherine Lutz

In December 2008, shortly before being sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama pledged his belief that, “to ensure prosperity here at home and peace abroad”, it was vital to maintain “the strongest military on the planet”. Unveiling his national security team, including George Bush’s defence secretary, Robert Gates, he said: “We also agree the strength of our military has to be combined with the wisdom and force of diplomacy, and that we are going to be committed to rebuilding and restrengthening alliances around the world to advance American interests and American security.”

Unfortunately, many of the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts are being directed towards maintaining and garnering new access for the US military across the globe. US military officials, through their Korean proxies, have completed the eviction of resistant rice farmers from their land around Camp Humphreys, South Korea, for its expansion (including a new 18-hole golf course); they are busily making back-room deals with officials in the Northern Mariana Islands to gain the use of the Pacific islands there for bombing and training purposes; and they are scrambling to express support for a regime in Kyrgyzstan that has been implicated in the murder of its political opponents but whose Manas Airbase, used to stage US military actions in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama and the Pentagon consider crucial for the expanded war there.

The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn (£89bn). The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over.

The official figures exclude the huge build-up of troops and structures in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade, as well as secret or unacknowledged facilities in Israel, Kuwait, the Philippines and many other places. In just three years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, £2bn was spent on military construction. A single facility in Iraq, Balad Airbase, houses 30,000 troops and 10,000 contractors, and extends across 16 square miles, with an additional 12 square mile “security perimeter”. From the battle zones of Afghanistan and Iraq to quiet corners of Curaçao, Korea and Britain, the US military domain consists of sprawling army bases, small listening posts, missile and artillery testing ranges and berthed aircraft carriers (moved to “trouble spots” around the world, each carrier is considered by the US navy as “four and a half acres of sovereign US territory”). While the bases are, literally speaking, barracks and weapons depots, staging areas for war-making and ship repairs, complete with golf courses and basketball courts, they are also political claims, spoils of war, arms sale showrooms and toxic industrial sites. In addition to the cultural imperialism and episodes of rape, murder, looting and land seizure that have always accompanied foreign armies, local communities are now subjected to the ear-splitting noise of jets on exercise, to the risk of helicopters and warplanes crashing into residential areas, and to exposure to the toxic materials that the military uses in its daily operations.

The global expansion of US bases – and with it the rise of the US as a world superpower – is a legacy of the Second World War. In 1938, the US had 14 military bases outside its continental borders. Seven years later, it had 30,000 installations in roughly 100 countries. While this number was projected to shrink to 2,000 by 1948 (following pressure from other nations to return bases in their own territory or colonies, and pressure at home to demobilise the 12 million-man military), the US continued to pursue access rights to land and air space around the world. It established security alliances with multiple states within Europe (NATO), the Middle East and south Asia (CENTO) and south-east Asia (SEATO), as well as bilateral agreements with Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand. Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAS) were crafted in each country to specify what the military could do, and usually gave US soldiers broad immunity from prosecution for crimes committed and environmental damage caused. These agreements and subsequent base operations have mostly been shrouded in secrecy, helped by the National Security Act of 1947. New US bases were built in remarkable numbers in West Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, with the defeated Axis powers hosting the most significant numbers (at one point, Japan was peppered with 3,800 US installations).

As battles become bases, so bases become battles; the sites in east Asia acquired during the Spanish-American war in 1898 and during the Second World War – such as Guam, Thailand and the Philippines – became the primary bases from which the US waged war on Vietnam. The number of raids over north and south Vietnam required tons of bombs unloaded at the naval station in Guam. The morale of ground troops based in Vietnam, as fragile as it was to become through the latter part of the 1960s, depended on R&R (rest and recreation) at bases outside the country, which allowed them to leave the war zone and yet be shipped back quickly and inexpensively for further fighting. The war also depended on the heroin the CIA was able to ship in to the troops on the battlefield in Vietnam from its secret bases in Laos. By 1967, the number of US bases had returned to 1947 levels.

Technological changes in warfare have had important effects on the configuration of US bases. Long-range missiles and the development of ships that can make much longer runs without resupply have altered the need for a line of bases to move forces forward into combat zones, as has the aerial refuelling of military jets. An arms airlift from the US to the British in the Middle East in 1941-42, for example, required a long hopscotch of bases, from Florida to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Trinidad, British Guiana, north-east Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, Takoradi (now in Ghana), Lagos, Kano (now in Nigeria) and Khartoum, before finally making delivery in Egypt. In the early 1970s, US aircraft could make the same delivery with one stop in the Azores, and today can do so non-stop.

On the other hand, the pouring of money into military R&D (the Pentagon has spent more than $85bn in 2009), and the corporate profits to be made in the development and deployment of the resulting technologies, have been significant factors in the ever larger numbers of technical facilities on foreign soil. These include such things as missile early-warning radar, signals intelligence, satellite control and space-tracking telescopes. The will to gain military control of space, as well as gather intelligence, has led to the establishment of numerous new military bases in violation of arms-control agreements such as the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. In Colombia and Peru, and in secret and mobile locations elsewhere in Latin America, radar stations are primarily used for anti-trafficking operations.

Since 2000, with the election of George W Bush and the ascendancy to power of a group of men who believed in a more aggressive and unilateral use of military power (some of whom stood to profit handsomely from the increased military budget that would require), US imperial ambition has grown. Following the declaration of a war on terror and of the right to pre-emptive war, the number of countries into which the US inserted and based troops radically expanded. The Pentagon put into action a plan for a network of “deployment” or “forward operating” bases to increase the reach of current and future forces. The Pentagon-aligned, neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century stressed that “while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of ­Saddam Hussein”.

The new bases are designed to operate not defensively against particular threats but as offensive, expeditionary platforms from which military capabilities can be projected quickly, anywhere. The Global Defence Posture Review of 2004 announced these changes, focusing not just on reorienting the footprint of US bases away from cold war locations, but on remaking legal arrangements that support expanded ­military activities with other allied countries and prepositioning equipment in those countries. As a recent army strategic document notes, “Military personnel can be transported to, and fall in on, prepositioned equipment significantly more quickly than the equivalent unit could be transported to the theatre, and prepositioning equipment overseas is generally less politically difficult than stationing US military personnel.”

Terms such as facility, outpost or station are used for smaller bases to suggest a less permanent presence. The US department of defence currently distinguishes between three types of military facility. “Main operating bases” are those with permanent personnel, strong infrastructure, and often family housing, such as Kadena Airbase in Japan and Ramstein Airbase in Germany. “Forward operating sites” are “expandable warm facilit[ies] maintained with a limited US military support presence and possibly prepositioned equipment”, such as Incirlik Airbase in Turkey and Soto Cano Airbase in Honduras. Finally, “co-operative security locations” are sites with few or no permanent US personnel, maintained by contractors or the host nation for occasional use by the US military, and often referred to as “lily pads”. These are cropping up around the world, especially throughout Africa, a recent example being in Dakar, Senegal.

Moreover, these bases are the anchor – and merely the most visible aspect – of the US military’s presence overseas. Every year, US forces train 100,000 soldiers in 180 countries, the presumption being that beefed-up local militaries will help to pursue US interests in local conflicts and save the US money, casualties and bad publicity when human rights abuses occur (the blowback effect of such activities has been made clear by the strength of the Taliban since 9/11). The US military presence also involves jungle, urban, desert, maritime and polar training exercises across wide swathes of landscape, which have become the pretext for substantial and permanent positioning of troops. In recent years, the US has run around 20 exercises annually on Philippine soil, which have resulted in a near-continuous presence of US soldiers in a country whose people ejected US bases in 1992 and whose constitution forbids foreign troops to be based on its territory. Finally, US personnel work every day to shape local legal codes to facilitate US access: they have lobbied, for example, to change the Philippine and Japanese constitutions to allow, respectively, foreign troop basing and a more-than-defensive military.

Asked why the US has a vast network of military bases around the world, Pentagon officials give both utilitarian and humanitarian arguments. Utilitarian arguments include the claim that bases provide security for the US by deterring attack from hostile countries and preventing or remedying unrest or military challenges; that bases serve the national economic interests of the US, ensuring access to markets and commodities needed to maintain US standards of living; and that bases are symbolic markers of US power and credibility – and so the more the better. Humanitarian arguments present bases as altruistic gifts to other nations, helping to liberate or democratise them, or offering aid relief. None of these humanitarian arguments deals with the problem that many of the bases were taken during wartime and “given” to the US by another of the war’s victors.

Critics of US foreign policy have dissected and dismantled the arguments made for maintaining a global system of military basing. They have shown that the bases have often failed in their own terms: despite the Pentagon’s claims that they provide security to the regions they occupy, most of the world’s people feel anything but reassured by their presence. Instead of providing more safety for the US or its allies, they have ­often provoked attacks, and have made the communities around bases key targets of other nations’ missiles. On the island of Belau in the Pacific, the site of sharp resistance to US attempts to instal a submarine base and jungle training centre, people describe their experience of military basing in the Second World War: “When soldiers come, war comes.” On Guam, a joke among locals is that few people except for nuclear strategists in the Kremlin know where their island is.

As for the argument that bases serve the national economic interest of the US, the weapons, personnel and fossil fuels involved cost billions of dollars, most coming from US taxpayers. While bases have clearly been concentrated in countries with key strategic resources, particularly along the routes of oil and gas pipelines in central Asia, the Middle East and, increasingly, Africa, from which one-quarter of US oil imports are expected by 2015, the profits have gone first of all to the corporations that build and service them, such as Halliburton. The myth that bases are an altruistic form of “foreign aid” for locals is exploded by the substantial costs involved for host economies and polities. The immediate negative effects include levels of pollution, noise, crime and lost productive land that cannot be offset by soldiers’ local spending or employment of local people. Other putative gains tend to benefit only local elites and further militarise the host nations: elaborate bilateral negotiations swap weapons, cash and trade privileges for overflight and land-use rights. Less explicitly, rice imports, immigration rights to the US or overlooking human rights abuses have been the currency of exchange.

The environmental, political, and economic impact of these bases is enormous. The social problems that accompany bases, including soldiers’ violence against women and car crashes, have to be handled by local communities without compensation from the US. Some communities pay the highest price: their farmland taken for bases, their children neurologically damaged by military jet fuel in their water supplies, their neighbors imprisoned, tortured and disappeared by the autocratic regimes that survive on US military and political support given as a form of tacit rent for the bases. The US military has repeatedly interfered in the domestic affairs of nations in which it has or desires military access, operating to influence votes and undermine or change local laws that stand in the way.

Social movements have proliferated around the world in response to the empire of US bases, ever since its inception. The attempt to take the Philippines from Spain in 1898 led to a drawn-out guerrilla war for independence that required 126,000 US occupation troops to stifle. Between 1947 and 1990, the US military was asked to leave France, Yugoslavia, Iran, Ethiopia, Libya, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Peru, Mexico and Venezuela. Popular and political objection to the bases in Spain, the Philippines, Greece and Turkey in the 1980s gave those governments the grounds to negotiate ­significantly more compensation from the US. Portugal threatened to evict the US from important bases in the Azores unless it ceased its support for independence for its African colonies.

Since 1990, the US has been sent packing, most significantly, from the Philippines, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Vieques and Uzbekistan. Of its own accord, for varying reasons, it decided to leave countries from Ghana to Fiji. Persuading the US to clean up after itself – including, in Panama, more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance – is a further struggle. As in the case of the US navy’s removal from Vieques in 2003, arguments about the environmental and health damage of the military’s activities remain the centrepiece of resistance to bases.

Many are also concerned by other countries’ overseas bases – primarily European, Russian and Chinese – and by the activities of their own militaries, but the far greater number of US bases and their weaponry has understandably been the focus. The sense that US bases represent a major injustice to the host community and nation is very strong in countries where US bases have the longest standing and are most ubiquitous. In Okinawa, polls show that 70 to 80 per cent of the island’s people want the bases, or at least the marines, to leave. In 1995, the abduction and rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two US marines and one US sailor led to demands for the removal of all US bases in Japan. One family in Okinawa has built a large peace museum right up against the edge of the Futenma Airbase, with a stairway to the roof that allows busloads of schoolchildren and other visitors to view the sprawling base after looking at art depicting the horrors of war.

In Korea, the great majority of the population feels that a reduction in US presence would increase national security; in recent years, several violent deaths at the hands of US soldiers triggered vast candlelight vigils and protests across the country. And the original inhabitants of Diego Garcia, evicted from their homes between 1967 and 1973 by the British on behalf of the US for a naval base, have organised a concerted campaign for the right to return, bringing legal suit against the British government, a story told in David Vine’s recent book Island of Shame. There is also resistance to the US expansion plans into new areas. In 2007, a number of African nations baulked at US attempts to secure access to sites for military bases. In eastern Europe, despite well-funded campaigns to convince Poles and Czechs of the value of US bases and much sentiment in favour of accepting them in pursuit of closer ties with Nato and the EU, and promised economic benefits, vigorous pro­tests have included hunger strikes and led the Czech government, in March, to reverse its plan to allow a US military radar base to be built in the country.

The US has responded to action against bases with a renewed emphasis on “force protection”, in some cases enforcing curfews on soldiers, and cutting back on events that bring local people on to base property. The department of defence has also engaged in the time-honoured practice of renaming: clusters of soldiers, buildings and equipment have become “defence staging posts” or “forward operating locations” rather than military bases. Regulating documents become “visiting forces agreements”, not “status of forces agreements”, or remain entirely secret. While major reorganisation of bases is under way for a host of reasons, including a desire to create a more mobile force with greater access to the Middle East, eastern Europe and central Asia, the motives also include an attempt to prevent political momentum of the sort that ended US use of the Vieques and Philippine bases.

The attempt to gain permanent basing in Iraq foundered in 2008 on the objections of forces in both Iraq and the US. Obama, in his Cairo speech in June, may have insisted that “we pursue no bases” in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but there has been no sign of any significant dismantling of bases there, or of scaling back the US military presence in the rest of the world. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, recently visited Japan to ensure that it follows through on promises to provide the US with a new airfield on Okinawa and billions of dollars to build new housing and other facilities for 8,000 marines relocating to Guam. She ignored the invitation of island activists to come and see the damage left by previous decades of US base activities. The myriad land-grabs and hundreds of billions of dollars spent to quarter troops around the world persist far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, and too far from the headlines.
© 2009 The New Statesman
Catherine Lutz is a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University and editor of “The Bases of Empire: the Global Struggle against US Military Posts” (Pluto Press, £17.99)

by Deepti Hajela

NEW YORK – Immigration agents raiding homes for suspected illegal immigrants violated the U.S. Constitution by entering without proper consent and may have used racial profiling, a report analyzing arrest records found.

A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer checks a Guatemalan illegal immigrant during her deportation process in Phoenix, Arizona July 10, 2009. (REUTERS/Carlos Barria)

Latinos made up a disproportionate number of the people arrested who were not the stated targets of the raids, and many of their arrest reports gave no basis for why they were initially seized, said the report, which was based on data from raids in New York and New Jersey.

The Immigration Justice Clinic at Yeshiva University’s Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law analyzed home raid arrest records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices in Long Island and throughout New Jersey. The clinic, founded last year, represents indigent immigrants facing deportation.

Its report, released Wednesday, said that since ICE agents use administrative warrants – instead of judicial warrants, which give law enforcement unfettered access – they must have a resident’s consent to enter a home or else violate the constitutional right to protection against unreasonable searches.

On Long Island, 86 percent of arrest records from 100 raids between January 2006 and April 2008 showed no record of consent being given, the report found. In northern and central New Jersey, no record of consent being given was found for 24 percent of about 600 arrests in 2006 and 2007, it found.

Peter Markowitz, director of the clinic and one of the authors of the report, said raids often are carried out with great force, with immigration officials pushing their way into homes in pre-dawn or late-night hours.

The raids are ostensibly aimed at targeted individuals who present threats either to national security or community safety, but arrests of illegal immigrants nearby, known as collateral arrests, are also made.

While the report only analyzed data from two states, it said the pattern suggested the problem was nationwide. It listed examples from California, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Georgia and other places.

A federal judge in Connecticut last month ruled that federal agents violated the constitutional rights of four illegal immigrants in a 2007 raid under similar issues. The judge ruled the immigration agents went into the immigrants’ homes without warrants, probable cause or their consent, and he put a stop to deportation proceedings against the four defendants.

“The widespread illegality by a law enforcement agency should be kind of shocking to anybody,” Markowitz said.

In a statement, ICE said its agents uphold the country’s laws.

“We do so professionally, humanely and with an acute awareness regarding the impact enforcement has on the individuals we encounter,” it said.

The agency said it also had a mandate to pursue all illegal immigrants, whether targeted or not. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment further.

The agency has about 100 Fugitive Operations Teams around the country; in fiscal year 2008, the teams made more than 34,000 arrests.

The report also found that Latinos were a disproportionate number of collateral arrests. In both New Jersey and on Long Island, two-thirds of the targeted detainees were Latino. But 87 percent of collateral arrests in New Jersey were Latino, as were 94 percent of the collateral arrests in Long Island.

Collateral arrest records can indicate why the person was seized and questioned. But the report found that almost all of the records that didn’t contain that information were for Latinos taken into custody. The report said that supported community complaints that Latinos were targeted for arrest simply because of how they looked or how well they spoke English.

The report makes several recommendations, including limiting the use of home raids to a last resort for targets who pose a serious risk to national security or have violent criminal records; the use of judicial rather than administrative warrants, and the videotaping of all home raids.

It also calls for the Department of Homeland Security Office of the Inspector General to conduct an investigation.

“These are violations that go to the very heart of the Constitutional expectation of privacy in this country,” Markowitz said.

Remember Barack Obama during the campaign — full of hope, change, and promises to make a clean break from the disastrous policies of George Bush? 6 months into his Presidency, not only has he failed to live up to the most basic of his promises, but he has embraced many of Bush’s most asinine and destructive positions.

Days before his inauguration, Obama made it clear he would close Guantanamo Bay, begin the process of moving current detainees through US or international legal systems, and stop torture from being committed by Americans. In fact, he blankly stated [via MSNBC]:

“I was clear throughout this campaign and was clear throughout this transition that under my administration the United States does not torture,” Obama said… “We will abide by the Geneva Conventions. We will uphold our highest ideals.”

And now? [via Wall Street Journal]

The Obama administration said Tuesday it could continue to imprison non-U.S. citizens indefinitely even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by a U.S. military commission…

Like the Bush administration, the Obama administration argues that the legal basis for indefinite detention of aliens it considers dangerous is separate from war-crimes prosecutions. Officials say that the laws of war allow indefinite detention to prevent aliens from committing warlike acts in future, while prosecution by military commission aims to punish them for war crimes committed in the past.

Yes, you read that right folks! Barack Obama’s administration is using the same legal justification as George Bush’s to detain ’suspected war criminals’, even if they are found innocent by a military tribunal or American court.

Oh, and remember how he was opposed to Bush’s consolidation of powers in the executive branch and the NSA wiretapping program:

This is in late 2007, but Obama’s message is clear: Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program is illegal, against the principle and spirit of the Constitution, and completely unjustifiable, even with ‘terrorist threats’.

Welp, 6 months into his administration, guess what! Obama now wants to protect the warrantless wiretap program [via the Electronic Frontier Foundation]:

The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration’s position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping program, filing a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA late Friday.

The Obama Justice Department claims in its motion that litigation over the wiretapping program would require the government to disclose privileged “state secrets.” These are essentially the same arguments made by the Bush administration three years ago in Hepting v. AT&T, EFF’s lawsuit against one of the telecom giants complicit in the NSA spying.

Oh, and not to mention that he is now encouraging failed banks and companies receiving government bailouts to hand out large bonuses to their executives, staffed his entire Treasury Department with Goldman Sachs alumni, has refused to prosecute Americans who committed torture, and held private meetings with coal executives and continued to push for mythical ‘clean coal’.

How the coming vegetarian revolution will arrive by force.

By Jim Motavalli

I have a prediction: Sooner than you might think, this will be a vegetarian world. Future generations will find the idea of eating meat both morally absurd and logistically impossible. Of course, one need only look at the booming meat industry, the climbing rates of meat consumption in the developing world, and the menu of just about any restaurant to call me crazy. But already, most people know that eating red meat is bad for their health and harmful for the planet. It’s getting them to actually change their diet that’s the hard part — and that’s exactly why it won’t happen by choice.

Going by the numbers, eating meat is pretty hard to justify for the even moderately health-conscious. A National Cancer Institute report released last March found that people who ate the most red meat were, as the New York Times put it, “most likely to die from cancer, heart disease and other causes.” The biggest abstainers “were least likely to die.” Those who eat five ounces of meat daily, (the equivalent of one and a half Quarter Pounders or Big Macs) increase their risk from cancer or heart disease by 30 percent compared to those who eat two-thirds of an ounce daily — a stark difference.

The environmental impact is also crystal clear — and similarly appalling. “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” a 2006 report by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organzation (FAO), found that livestock is a major player in climate change, accounting for 18 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions (measured in carbon dioxide equivalents), or more than the entire global transportation system.

The obvious solution to both health and environmental disasters is to stop eating meat altogether. But this is easier said than done. Even the studies addressing the impact of meat on the planet downplay vegetarianism, as if the authors are nervous to press it on people. Going veggie is not even proposed as one of the FAO’s “mitigation options” (which instead include conservation tillage, organic farming, and better nutrition for livestock to reduce methane gas production). Nor is it emphasized in “Happier Meals: Rethinking the Global Meat Industry,” a report by Danielle Nierenberg at the Worldwatch Institute. The study’s author is herself a vegan, but she told me, “Food choices are a very personal decision for most people. We are only now convincing them that this is a tool at their disposal if they care about the environment.”

She has a point: Giving up meat is tough, and arguing people into it is probably a losing proposition. Even with all the statistics out there about the dangers of meat, there are fewer vegetarians in the world than you’d think. A Harris poll conducted in 2006 for the Vegetarian Resource Group found that only 2.3 percent of American adults 18 or older claim never to eat meat, fish, or fowl. A larger group, 6.7 percent, say they “never eat meat,” but often that means they only avoid the red kind. Worldwide, local vegetarian societies report high participation in just a few places – for example, 40 percent in India, 10 percent in Italy, 9 percent in Germany, 8.5. percent in Israel, and 6 percent in Britain.

So how will we become a vegetarian planet? The numbers suggest that we won’t stop eating meat simply because it’s “the right thing to do.” People love it too much. Instead, we’ll be forced to stop. By 2025, we simply won’t have the resources to keep up the habit. According to the FAO report, 33 percent of the world’s arable land is devoted to growing crops for animal feed, and grazing is a major factor in deforestation around the world. It’s also incredibly water-intensive. The average U.S. diet requires twice the daily amount of water as does an equally nutritious vegetarian diet, reports the Worldwatch Institute. Meanwhile, there will be more than 8 billion people on this earth, and two-thirds of the world’s population will live in water-stressed regions.

Sounds like a mess — and one that doesn’t bode well for our cattle cravings. Meat will disappear — except as a luxury available to few — and the ethical issues will evolve, too. In the way that slavery, once a broad social norm, later became an unthinkable crime, we can expect to see a similar shift once meat-eating disappears from our planet. Perhaps, some day, the very idea of eating animal flesh will seem as remote as the idea of owning humans does now. So if you’re a carnivore, enjoy now — before the inevitable vegetarian revolution begins.

Jim Motavalli is a senior writer at E/The Environmental Magazine and blogs for the Mother Nature Network.

On July 16th at 7 AM on the coast of Namibia, award winning journalists Bart Smithers (South Africa) and Jim Wickens (United Kingdom) were physically assaulted and arrested for filming the Namibian seal cull. They are currently being held at Henties Bay Police Station. Both the South African and British Embassies have been informed and are demanding the release of the journalists.

The two men were filming the controversial hunt in the Cape Cross Seal Reserve in Western Namibia. They were attacked by the sealers who were wielding clubs for the purpose of killing seals. Wickens and Smithers were working with for Eco-Storm on a project regarding the cruel Namibian seal slaughter, in conjunction with Dutch NGO Bontvoordieren. Namibian authorities have confiscated their cameras and video.

Smithers produced the award-winning feature story on Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s 2005/2006 Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign with South Africa 50/50, called “The Hunters Become Hunted”. Smithers has long been involved in conservation journalism and is involved in EcoEye.org which aims to expose those who are damaging, exploiting and ultimately destroying our world for short term gain.

“In a time when the European Union has just banned the import of all seal products, Namibia refuses to join civilized society by continuing the senseless slaughter of seals and by clubbing to death any semblance of freedom of the press or freedom of speech. Bart and Jim are political prisoners and need to be released immediately,” said Peter Hammarstedt, personal friend of Bart Smithers, and first mate of the M/Y Farley Mowat, Sea Shepherd’s seal protection vessel. Canadian authorities seized the Farley Mowat after filming a seal being skinned alive in Canada last spring.

Please write to the Namibian embassy in your country demanding the release of the journalists and defend their efforts to expose the cruel Namibian seal slaughter to the world.

by via Max Blumenthal

Tuesday Jul 14th, 2009 9:28 PM

On May 27, journalist Jesse Rosenfeld and I set out on the streets of Tel Aviv to probe the political opinions of young local residents. We started the day filming at Tel Aviv University, where a group of Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students gathered to protest a proposed law that would criminalize public observance of the Nakba, or the mass expulsion and killing of Palestinians by Zionist militias in 1948. There, we interviewed Palestinian Israeli students about the rising climate of repression, then spoke to another group of students who gathered nearby to heckle their Arab classmates and demand their deportation. A few hundred meters away, two genial business students expressed support for the so-called Nakba law, remarking to us, “If you want to keep democracy, you can’t let people protest against the independence of the country.”

That evening, Jesse and I took our camera to central Tel Aviv, where thousands were taking part in the annual all-night festival known as White Night. Some revelers took an intermission from the partying to express to us their hatred for the Iranian people. And a group of teenagers launched into a virtually unprompted diatribe against Barack Obama, referring to him as a Nazi, a Muslim, and a “Cushi,” which is Hebrew slang for “nigger.” When questioned about the source of his opinions, one teenager proudly declared himself a “gezan,” or a racist.

This video, entitled “Feeling the Hate in Tel Aviv,” is the sequel to a piece the Israeli blogger Joseph Dana and I released in June called “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem.” That video, which featured a cast of mostly American Jews in Jerusalem leveling racist vitriol at Obama, stirred immediate controversy, prompting the Huffington Post to remove it on the grounds that it was not “newsworthy.” As the “not newsworthy” video began climbing towards 400,000 hits on YouTube, and before YouTube and Vimeo banned it without explanation and without offering me any legal recourse, the Israeli media weighed in. (“Feeling the Hate” has been reposted here).

Benjamin Hartman, a young correspondent for Ha’aretz who had moved to Israel from his hometown of Austin, Texas, wrote that my video was “circling the internet at a critical velocity on a mission to humiliate the Jewish people.” Hartmann concluded that I was “speaking to the wrong crowd at the wrong time of night,” a meme that would comprise the key talking point for bloggers and organized Jewish groups (including the Israeli chapter of Democrats Abroad) seeking to discredit and ultimately suppress the video.

Hartmann then offered me advice on where to find the right crowd, and at which time of night they might be on their best behavior. “I hope Blumenthal films his next segment in Tel Aviv, though the results would probably be far less salacious,” Hartman wrote. “On a balcony in Florentin, he would ask the drum circle what they think of Obama and through the purple haze would hear only praise for the president, before being forced to listen to a 30-minute account of a recent trip to Nepal.”

Unbeknownst to Hartman, who only attempted to interview me days after publishing his review, and then published a piece questioning whether I had been “fueling anti-Semitism,” I had already filmed my next segment in Tel Aviv. (And I had already spent an evening, sans camera, with an Israeli hippy on a balcony in Florentin, though he told me through the purple haze that the Palestinian people do not exist and should be immediately transferred to Jordan). Now that I have released my footage from Tel Aviv, I wonder what Hartman and other, even more insecure critics of my first “Feeling the Hate” video will do to ensure that the sequel does not “humiliate the Jewish people.” Will they rely on the same old hasbara?

Can they still claim that clean-cut students at Tel Aviv University were “the wrong crowd?” Was filming during the afternoon, or during the evening at an officially sanctioned festival still “the wrong time?” And could I have listened to similarly racist opinions in “an American college town,” as Hartman suggested? Perhaps for my next video I should ask frat brothers at the University of South Dakota if they would like their Native American classmates to be jailed for three years for observing the massacre of Wounded Knee. Or I could ask Anglo students at the University of Texas, located in Hartman’s hometown, if they want the US government to round up every single Latino student on campus — especially those who are US citizens — and deport them to somewhere south of the border. Call me an idealist, but for some reason I don’t think this project would go anywhere.

If Hartman chooses to review the sequel, I hope he will explain how he has so stringently avoided any exposure to the crude racism, bellicose nationalism and anti-democratic sentiments I heard expressed on a daily basis by young, seemingly cosmopolitan Jewish Israelis during the month I spent living in the so-called “bubble city” of Tel Aviv. Or perhaps Hartman has been exposed to it, but believes racism in Tel Aviv must be concealed from the goyim to avoid tribal humiliation. Harvard University Yiddish literature professor Ruth Wisse has promoted this mentality, telling a group of young Jewish journalists in 2007 that they should not act as independent-minded critics but rather as “soldiers” for Israel, “armed with pens instead of Uzis,’ as Eric Alterman recalled.

Gershom Gorenberg, the writer American opinion pages so often turn to for a supposedly progressive Israeli perspective, attacked “Feeling the Hate in Jerusalem” as “an argument for old media,” claiming the video did not pass journalistic muster because I didn’t interview enough “real” Israelis. Have I now met Gorenberg’s threshold for Israeli interview subjects? If Gorenberg, who recently took to the pages of the neocon Weekly Standard to pontificate on “The Missing Mahatma in Palestine, has any further advice on improving my reporting chops, I hope he will help readers locate the Israeli MLK as well. He can start with the Tel Aviv U student who confuses Martin Luther King with Rodney King, then proceeds to mock his optimistic philosophy.

Uncomfortable as is may be for many to confront, Israeli resentment of Arabs, minorities and designated foreign enemies ranging from the Iranian people to Barack Obama is not a phenomenon exclusive to the denizens of fanatical settlements in the West Bank. The trend now hovers well above the surface in the mainstream of Israeli society, including throughout Tel Aviv. It is reflected most apparently in the almost total national support for Israel’s brutal, maximalist war on the civilian population of the Gaza Strip in December 2008, the subsequent election of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascent of Avigdor Lieberman and his proto-fascist Yisrael Beiteynu party.

It is also reflected in unreported daily indignities against members of the country’s Arab population, like the detention and interrogation I witnessed in the Florentin district of two Palestinian Israeli men by Tel Aviv police officers. Their crime, I learned, was speaking Arabic on a city bus. “The police are always on my dick,” one of the men told me after he was released. “But that’s what it’s like being Palestinian in Tel Aviv, so I’ve gotten used to it.”

The proposed bills that have flooded the Knesset since the election which seek to criminalize the speech of Palestinian Israelis and demand they make loyalty oaths under threat of deportation, along with the constant raids and repressive actions by Israeli authorities against anti-occupation activists, reveal a country careening rapidly and perhaps irrevocably towards authoritarianism. Just as Hamas reflects the genuine national aspirations of Palestinians, the far-right coalition government of Israel embodies the mood of Israeli society. This is not a momentary aberration.

“I don’t think there is a qualitative change [in Israeli society], I think there’s a deepening of trends,” former Knesset member and New Israel Fund President Naomi Chazan told me. “One day it’s the Arabs, the next day it’s going to be the secular people, the next day it’s going to be women. You know where the repression starts but you have no idea where it ends.”

http://maxblumenthal.com/2009/07/feeling-t…

Mounting Rights Violations Fan the Flames of Escalating Public Outcry

IWW Starbucks Workers Union

June 1, 2009

Minneapolis, MN – The Starbucks Coffee Co. settled a complaint today from the National Labor Relations Board over charges of violating workers’ rights — the sixth such settlement in three years for the ailing coffee giant. The case comes as a new website (StopStarbucks.com) and viral video calling on CEO Howard Schultz to respect workers’ right to join a labor union spread like wildfire across the Internet. The new media initiative, from Robert Greenwald’s “Brave New Films”, has already been viewed over 60,000 times with a related petition garnering almost 15,000 signatures.

“This settlement proves that Starbucks executives are not above the law and cannot block hard working baristas from making positive change,” said Angel Gardner, a barista and member of the Starbucks Workers Union in the Twin Cities. “How can Starbucks claim that it maintains a positive work environment when one labor case after another exposes its lack of respect for employees?”

Pursuant to the settlement which stems from charges filed by the IWW Starbucks Workers Union, the corporation must cease engaging in a slew of illegal measures including threatening to call security to interfere with protected activity, prohibiting workers from discussing the union, and expelling union sympathizers from company stores. Today’s settlement is the first since a Labor Board judge found Starbucks guilty last December of similar rights violations in the first ever trial between baristas and the coffee chain.

“Howard Schultz needs to create quality jobs for hard working families, not just line the pockets of the fat cats at corporate headquarters,” said Erik Forman, a barista and member of the Starbucks Workers Union. “Our campaign for secure work hours, fair pay, and a voice at work gains momentum every day.”

The IWW Starbucks Workers Union is an organization of over 300 current and former employees at the world’s largest coffee chain united for secure work hours, a living wage, and respect on the job. The union has members throughout the United States fighting for positive change at the company and defending baristas treated unfairly by management.

###

–
Starbucks Workers Union- Twin Cities
Industrial Workers of the World
web: http://starbucksunion.org