Pilger: Who said anything about free speech?

"This month's Supreme Court hearing in the Julian Assange case has profound meaning for the preservation of basic freedoms in western democracies. This is Assange's final appeal against his extradition to Sweden to face allegations of sexual misconduct that were originally dismissed by the chief prosecutor in Stockholm and constitute no crime in Britain.

The consequences, if he loses, lie not in Sweden but in the shadows cast by America's descent into totalitarianism. In Sweden, he is at risk of being "temporarily surrendered" to the US, where his life has been threatened and he is accused of "aiding the enemy" with Bradley Manning, the young soldier accused of leaking evidence of US war crimes to WikiLeaks.

The connections between Manning and Assange have been concocted by a secret grand jury in Virginia that allowed no defence counsel or witnesses, and by a system of plea-bargaining that ensures a 90 per cent conviction rate. It is reminiscent of a Soviet show trial."






So begins an op-piece by veteran author, journalist, film-maker and commentator John Pilger in the NewStatesman.

"WikiLeaks has given Australians a rare glimpse of how their country is run. In 2010, leaked US cables disclosed that top government figures in the Labor Party coup that brought Julia Gillard to power were "protected" sources of the US embassy: what the CIA calls "assets". Kevin Rudd, the prime minister Gillard ousted, apparently had displeased Washington by being disobedient, even suggesting that Australian troops withdraw from Afghanistan.

In the wake of her portentous rise to power, Gillard attacked WikiLeaks's actions as "illegal" and her attorney general threatened to withdraw Assange's passport. Yet the Australian Federal Police reported that Assange and Wiki­Leaks had broken no law. Freedom of Information files have since shown that Australian diplomats have colluded with the US in its pursuit of Assange. This is not unusual. The government of John Howard ignored the rule of law and conspired with the US to keep David Hicks, an Australian citizen, in Guantanamo Bay, where he was tortured.

Australia's principal intelligence organisation, Asio, is allowed to imprison refugees indefinitely without explanation, prosecution or appeal.  Every Australian citizen in grave difficulty overseas is said to have the right to diplomatic support. The denial of this to Assange, bar the perfunctory, is an unreported scandal. Last September his London lawyer, Gareth Peirce, wrote to the Australian government warning that Assange's "personal safety and security has become at risk in circumstances that have become highly politically charged". Only when the Melbourne Age reported that she had received no response did a dissembling official letter turn up.  In November, Peirce and I briefed the Australian consul general in London, Ken Pascoe. One of Britain's most experienced human rights lawyers, Peirce told him she feared a unique miscarriage of justice if Assange was extradited and his government remained silent. The silence remains."

So typical of the Murdoch press

That anyone gives any sort of credibility to  the Sun King, Rupert Murdoch, is surprising.  Leaving to one side the extraordinary widespread hacking involving his newspapers - who me? knowing anything? - the fact that the Murdoch presses have their own agenda even if it runs counter to the facts of life, is nothing new.    CommonDreams provides one recent example.

"Tales of Grotesquely Irresponsible Bias: Likening themselves to Soviet biologists "sent to the gulag" for politically unpopular views, 16 prominent climate change deniers took to the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal to argue there is "no compelling evidence" we need to do anything "dramatic" to stop "global warming" (sic). At the same time, 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable, but scientifically accurate, essay saying, actually, there is - and the WSJ refused to run it."

The West Bank: The unvarnished facts

Whilst Israel and its ever-loud allies forever pronounce that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East - a dubious and more than questionable position - Bernard Avishai reveals the hard facts on the situation Palestinians find themselves in the West Bank.

"....One has only to look at how the system (if that's the phrase for it) of justice works in the West Bank to know that justice has been anything but blind for a generation. And no organization has looked into that system, more thoroughly than the somewhat ironically named Yesh Din, or "There is Justice (or, perhaps, Verdict)." The chief legal counselor to Yesh Din, the indomitable Michael Sfard, recently prepared a summary report on how criminal complaints have been handled since Yesh Din began its work in 2005, which he kindly sent over to me.

Of the total number of crimes committed against West Bank Palestinians, about 38% involved gunfire, 42% damaged property, and 15% encroachments on private land.

91% of complaints to police resulted in no indictment: 86% of violent crimes; 96% of property crimes. Of 127 cases of olive groves being uprooted between 2006-2011, one case resulted in an indictment.

66% of cases were closed because police claim the perpetrators were unknown, 24% because there were no (credible) witnesses. Under 4% of crimes brought to the military police were investigated. (In over 90% of cases, settler alibis were accepted without corroboration or further investigation.)

Between 2007-2011, 267 complaints were filed against soldiers; in just 30 cases (about 11%) was it decided to open an investigation.

13 cases of settlers building on Palestinian private land resulted in 11 High Court injunctions; 5 of these have been violated without consequence. Land illegally built on for settler roads were retroactively expropriated for public purposes."    

Iran: Sanctions or Negotiations?

One would have to be deaf not to hear the drums of war - that is, attacking Iran in some form or other - beating ever louder.     One would have to be sceptical that anything positive could come out of any military mission.   Shades of Iraq and Afghanistan loom large!



Glenn Greenwald on Salon:

"One of the most significant foreign policy controversies of the 2008 presidential election centered around Barack Obama’s pledge ”to meet separately, without precondition” with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea. That seemingly off-the-cuff vow in response to a questioner at a July, 2007, Democratic primary debate was used first by Hillary Clinton, and then by John McCain, to depict Obama as naive, irresponsible, radical and — most ominously — overly sympathetic to America’s enemies (some liberal pundits echoed some of the same criticisms, while Mitt Romney is still trying to exploit that statement for those ends).

At the time, Chris Matthews pointed to this controversy, with his typical insight and prescience, to claim that Obama was too far to the left and it showed why “Hillary will win this thing” (Matthews: “They‘re putting this guy, whose middle name is Hussein, out there, saying he wants to go play in the sandbox with a holocaust denier.  That‘s brilliant politics if you‘re a Democrat”). When the controversy first arose, I vigorously defended Obama’s pro-negotiating position, pointing out that a plurality of Americans and a majority of Democrats were in favor of having the next President meet unconditionally with those leaders, and I further argued that “it is a petulant refusal to speak to the Bad People that is the real fringe, dangerous, extremist position.”

But we have now a great irony: America’s increasingly tense and dangerous conflict with Iran is characterized (one could even say caused) by the unwillingness of the Obama administration to engage meaningfully with Iran’s leaders. After a few early, symbolic gestures, it has been the administration’s refusal to pursue the most fruitful path for resolving the various disputes between the two nations — namely, direct negotiations and diplomacy — that is most responsible for the stand-off. As preeminent Iran expert Vali Nasr — the former Obama State Department advisor and current Tufts University Professor of International Politics — brilliantly explains in this six-minute interview, one I urge everyone to listen to, this anti-negotiating stance has rendered an escalating sanctions regime the only available course short of war, one that is highly unlikely, Nasr argues, to resolve the dispute, but instead is far more likely to lead to war (unintended or otherwise, especially in an election year)."

Will that be fertiliser with your Big Mac?

Yuck!    Whoever said, yet alone believed, that it was healthy to eat a Big Mac?

"McDonald's confirmed that it has eliminated the use of ammonium hydroxide — an ingredient in fertilizers, household cleaners and some roll-your-own explosives —  in its hamburger meat.

The company denied that its decision was influenced by a months-long campaign by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver to get ammonium-hydroxide-treated meats like chicken and beef out of the U.S. food supply. But it acknowledged this week that it had stopped using the unappetizing pink goo — made from treating otherwise inedible scrap meat with the chemical — several months ago.

Besides being used as a household cleaner and in fertilizers, the compound releases flammable vapors, and with the addition of certain acids, it can be turned into ammonium nitrate, a common component in homemade bombs. It's also widely used in the food industry as an anti-microbial agent in meats and as a leavener in bread and cake products. It's regulated by the U.S. Agriculture Department, which classifies it as "generally recognized as safe."

McDonald's decision was first reported this week by the Daily Mail, a blaring British tabloid, which trumpeted it as a victory for fellow Brit Oliver against the monolithic U.S. food industry.
Oliver's campaign began in April, when he included a segment on what he called "pink slime" on his TV show, "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution".

Obama: Ho hum....so those drones did kill civilians

From CommonDreams:

"In frank admission, Obama argues he has authority to bomb sovereign nations and that 'drones have not caused a great number of civilian casualties'"


Contrast Obama's bland assertion with this from New America Foundation:



"Our study shows that the 283 reported drone strikes in northwest Pakistan, including 70 in 2011, from 2004 to the present have killed approximately between 1,717 and 2,680 individuals, of whom around 1,424 to 2,209 were described as militants in reliable press accounts. Thus, the true non-militant fatality rate since 2004 according to our analysis is approximately 17 percent. In 2010, it was more like five percent."

For its part Amnesty International has posed this question to the Obama Administration:


The US authorities must give a detailed explanation of how these strikes are lawful and what is being done to monitor civilian casualties and ensure proper accountability, said Sam Zarifi Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific director.

What are the rules of engagement? What proper legal justification exists for these attacks? While the President's confirmation of the use of drones in Pakistan is a welcome first step towards transparency, these and other questions need to be answered. [...]

Past justifications offered by US officials have invoked legal theories based on a “global war” between the USA and al-Qa’ida, a concept not recognized by international humanitarian or human rights law.

"The US administration must use the occasion of Attorney General Holder's speech to disclose the relevant legal and factual documentation necessary for a meaningful assessment of the lawfulness of the deliberate killings it is carrying out - simply trying to find another way to say 'trust us, it's legal' will not be good enough," said Sam Zarifi.

Trumping Stalin's Gulag

America's prison system is subjected to searing and critical examination by well known author, Adam Gopnik, in his piece "The Caging of America" in The New Yorker magazine.

"For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country."

Baah to ebooks.....

The debate about ebooks continues unabated.     The latest to weigh in is the well known author Jonathan Franzen.   He has no time for ebooks and the technology associated with them - as The Telegraph reports.

"The author of Freedom and The Corrections, regarded as one of America’s greatest living novelists, said consumers had been conned into thinking that they need the latest technology."

****

"Speaking at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia, Franzen argued that e-books, such as Amazon’s Kindle, can never have the magic of the printed page.

He said: “The Great Gatsby was last updated in 1924. You don’t need it to be refreshed, do you?

“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that’s reassuring.

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

Franzen said he took comfort from knowing he will not be here in 50 years’ time to find out if books have become obsolete. "

Saving a life to a real beat!

Wonderful "instruction" video from the British Heart Foundation...

Is America a declining power?

There has been quite a bit of commentary lately - and from informed people too - on whether America is a declining power.    

Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, in writing on his blog on FP suggests the question is the incorrect one.

"As co-chair of the editorial board of the journal International Security, I couldn't be more delighted by the attention that Michael Beckley's article questioning China's rise (and America's supposed decline) is getting. See here, here, and here. But I fear that people who are seizing on Beckley's article to pooh-pooh fears of U.S. decline -- including our own Daniel Drezner -- are mostly asking the wrong question.

As I've noted elsewhere, the issue isn't whether the United States is about to fall the from the ranks of the great powers, or even be equaled (let alone surpassed) by a rising China. The world may be evolving toward a more multipolar structure, for example, but the United States is going to be one of those poles, and almost certainly the strongest of them, for many years to come.

Instead, the real issue is whether developments at home and overseas are making it harder for the United States to exercise the kind of dominant influence that it did for much of the latter half of the 20th century. The United States had a larger share of global GDP in the 1940s and 1950s, and it wasn't running enormous budget deficits. The United States was seen as a reliable defender of human rights, and its support for decolonization after World War II had won it many friends in the developing world. It also had good relations with a variety of monarchies and dictatorships, which it justified as part of the struggle against communism. These features allowed the United States to create and lead combined economic, security and political orders in virtually every corner of the world, except for the portions directly controlled by our communist rivals. And the U.S. and its allies eventually won that struggle too, driving the USSR into exhaustion and watching the triumph of market economies and more participatory forms of government throughout the former communist world.

The United States remains very powerful -- especially when compared with some putative opponents like Iran -- but its capacity to lead security and economic orders in every corner of the world has been diminished by failures in Iraq (and eventually, Afghanistan), by the burden of debt accumulated over the past decade, by the economic melt-down in 2007-2008, and by the emergence of somewhat stronger and independent actors in Brazil, Turkey, India, and elsewhere. One might also point to eroding national infrastructure and an educational system that impresses hardly anyone. Moreover, five decades of misguided policies have badly tarnished America's image in many parts of the world, and especially in the Middle East and Central Asia. The erosion of authoritarian rule in the Arab world will force new governments to pay more attention to popular sentiment -- which is generally hostile to the broad thrust of U.S. policy in the region -- and the United States will be less able to rely on close relations with tame monarchs or military dictators henceforth. If it the United States remains far and away the world's strongest state, its ability to get its way in world affairs is declining.

All this may seem like a hair-splitting, but there's an important issue at stake. Posing the question in the usual way ("Is the U.S. Still #1?", "Who's bigger?", "Is China Catching Up?" etc.,) focuses attention primarily on bilateral comparisons and distracts us from thinking about the broader environment in which both the United States and China will have to operate. The danger, of course, is that repeated assurances that America is still on top will encourage foreign policy mandarins to believe that they can continue to make the same blunders they have in the recent past, and discourage them from making the strategic choices that will preserve U.S. primacy, enhance U.S. influence, and incidentally, produce a healthier society here at home."

The devastating result of challenging the Chinese Government

From Australia's Radio Australia:

In just over two weeks, China's leader-in-waiting, Vice President Xi Jinping, will visit Washington DC to meet President Barack Obama.

For Mr Xi, the trip on February 14 is a chance to bolster his foreign policy credentials and to establish personal ties to another of the world's major powers.

It will also be an opportunity for various campaigners to raise issues related to China, one being the continued detention of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng.

The group Freedom Now has just filed a petition to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on behalf of Gao Zhisheng.

Correspondent: Liam Cochrane

Speaker: Jared Genser, founder of Freedom Now and one of Gao Zhisheng's international counsel

GENSER: Gao Zhisheng is a Chinese human rights lawyer interestingly was ranked by the China Daily, the state-run newspaper as one of the top ten lawyers in China about a decade ago, where he had more of a corporate law practice. But over the last decade, he started to first represent people whose properties had been wrongly taken away without compensation and then ended up representing a number of victims of human rights abuses and really crossed the line with the Chinese representing Falun Gong practitioners. And he was disappeared, ultimately convicted of subversion and given a five year suspended sentence and over the course of the last five years has spent more than three-and-a-half years in various terms of disappearances, the most recent one has been about 20 months long, although now the Chinese claim to have reappeared him, although no one has still seen him and he's in a prison allegedly in Western China and that three year sentence that he originally received for subversion has been reimposed.

COCHRANE: And during some of these periods of disappearance and imprisonment, he's been subjected to brutal torture that has been unveiled. Can you tell us a little bit of what the Chinese authorities have done to him?

GENSER: Sure, I mean it is about as horrific as it gets. I mean beating him to within an inch of death, piercing his genitals with pins, putting burning cigarettes up to his eyes, to the point that now his tear ducts are permanently damaged and he tears around the clock, tonnes of psychological torture, telling him that his family, his family members have committed suicide or that they were otherwise in bad health or dying or dead and trying to do anything humanly possible to get him to change his attitude toward the Chinese Government and, of course, none of this has been successful, which is precisely why he's had to be disappeared I think from the Chinese government perspective."

How to alienate many of your citizens

France is no stranger to violence in its streets.    Much of that has been from Muslims and  disadvantaged youth venting their frustration at the government's inability, or lack of will, to tackle myriads of issues confronting Muslims and the young.   By referring to protesters as, in effect, being rabble, the French President has helped things!

Human Rights Watch has highlighted another problem in France in a just-released Report "The Root of Humiliation".

"Most people in France have been stopped and asked by police for proof of their identity—or “contrôle  d’identité”—at some point in their lives.

Anyone can theoretically be asked for proof of identity, and a straightforward stop should
 usually last only a few minutes and involve little more than providing
 one’s identity card or other proof of identity upon demand by a police
 officer.

However, research conducted in and around Paris, Lyon, and Lille in 2011 indicates that the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police, who use the system as a
 central tool in their operations and have broad powers to stop and check
 individuals regardless of whether they suspect criminal activity. These abuses
 include repeated checks—“countless” in the words of most
 interviewees—sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse. Stops can
 involve lengthy questioning, orders to empty pockets, bag searches, and
 intrusive pat-downs—including of children as young as 14-years-old, who
 described having to put their hands against a wall or car to be patted down.

Moreover,statistical and anecdotal evidence indicates that young blacks and Arabs living
 in economically disadvantaged areas are particularly frequent targets for such
 stops, suggesting that police engage in ethnic profiling(i.e. making
 assumptions who is more likely to be a delinquent based on appearance,
 including race and ethnicity, rather than behavior) to determine who to stop.
 Many of the youths interviewed by Human Rights Watch for this report said they
 viewed identity checks to be the sharp edge of their broader experience of
 discrimination and exclusion in French society.

Such practices are justified by French authorities as security measures and have been
 court-sanctioned, and there may be some cases, as police officials argue, where
 there is good reason for police to intervene—such as unruly behavior that
 prompts calls from neighbors or illegal activity such as smoking marijuana.
 Moreover, police profiling can be a legitimate preventive and
 investigative tool, including when suspect descriptions including ethnicity or
 national origin are based on specific, reliable information. Human Rights Watch
 recognizes that police officers often face dangerous and
 threatening situations and must restrain violent individuals to protect
 themselves and others".

Grief diagnosis

The death of someone usually results in grieving by family and friends - which if the deceased was someone close, may go on for some time.

A question now under consideration in America is whether 2 months of grieving qualifies someone as being depressed.

Australia's ABC's Radio National Breakfast program takes up the issue:

"It is clear that a period of prolonged grief could turn into depression. But should the two conditions be diagnosed and treated in the same way? Next year the American Psychiatric Association will publish a new diagnostic and statistical manual, and a debate has broken out over whether grief should be included in the definition of depression."

Go here to hear an interview with Dr Allen Frances - Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Duke University, and Chair of the task force overseeing the compilation of the new diagnostic manual.

Old story...with a modern twist

Credited to Clement, National Post, Toronto

Now climate change threatens wheat crops

Last Friday the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed piece by a number of scientists challenging whether there really was climate change as many eminent scientists and science bodies have concluded.    The piece was, presumably, part of the Murdoch stable's stance of denying that the world is experiencing climate change.    Perhaps someone should send Murdoch and his op-ed writers this piece "New Study: Climate Change Threatens World's Wheat Crop.  It could be much more difficult than we thought to feed everyone in a warmer world" on CommonDreams.

"A study released Sunday afternoon finds that wheat crop yields could plunge due, in part, to climate change.

The study, published in Nature Climate Change, researchers warn that current projections underestimate the extent to which hotter weather in the future will accelerate this process. Extreme heat causes wheat crops to age faster and reduce yields, the Stanford University-led study shows, underscoring the challenge of feeding a rapidly growing population as the world continues to warm."

The "secret" about Victoria's Secret

First it was Gap, then Apple and now Victoria's Secret - companies who "use" employees in foreign countries to manufacture goods in and under conditions which are utterly appalling.   AlterNet reports about the fantasy world sought to be created Victoria's Secret on the one hand and the devastation caused by them on the other.

"Victoria’s Secret is in the business of selling fantasy. Its elite team of supermodels (called “angels”) are painstakingly selected and considered some of the most beautiful women in the world, and its fashion show is a major television event, this year attracting musical performances from Jay-Z and Nicki Minaj. It is about glamor and exceptionalism, and its marketing is centered inextricably around making women who wear Victoria’s Secret’s lingerie feel equally glamorous and exceptional.

But the company cannot ignore the increasing demand for sustainable products, and so when it began using “fair trade, organic cotton,” the sexy-seeking, environmentally minded could ostensibly feel better about their choice to patronize Victoria’s Secret. Little tags in tinier thongs noted: “Made with 20 percent organic cotton from Burkina Faso.”

Which sounds comforting, only an expose published this week by Bloomberg reports that the cotton at that farm in Burkina Faso is harvested by children, who are not only forced to work long hours in the grueling sun, but are beaten if they don’t perform up to par.

As Victoria’s Secret’s partner, [fair trade leader Georges] Guebre’s organization, the National Federation of Burkina Cotton Producers, is responsible for running all aspects of the organic and fair-trade program across Burkina Faso. Known by its French initials, the UNPCB in 2008 co-sponsored a study suggesting hundreds, if not thousands, of children like [13-year-old laborer] Clarisse could be vulnerable to exploitation on organic and fair-trade farms. The study was commissioned by the growers and Helvetas. Victoria’s Secret says it never saw the report.

The report goes on to note that because organic, fair trade cotton sells at a much higher price than cotton that is not stamped as such, the potential for exploitation increases. “The program has attracted subsistence farmers who say they don’t have the resources to grow fair-trade cotton without forcing other people’s children into their fields,” it says. The Bloomberg reporter spent six weeks in the cotton fields of Burkina Faso, investigating the lives of six children as young as 10, who work in conditions of slavery, with no possessions, and who live in fear of being whipped. The 13-year-old named Clarisse who’s the focus of the story lives with her cousin, the farmer who beats her, and eats once a day at the most, without access to education though school is legally mandated for her."

Getting desperate?

Credited to Rick McKee - staff cartoonist at The Augusta Chronicle

Once again, Obama's rhetoric doesn't match the reality

Obama's message of late has been a populist one - you know, referring to those fat cats on Wall St. and urging a more level playing field in the USA - but, yet again, Obama's words don't match the reality in how he conducts himself.    Justin Elliot in "Wall Street execs are major Obama fundraisers" on Salon details the "story" behind the Obama rhetoric.

"The consensus view of President Obama’s State of the Union address is that it was a “populist pitch” that sought to, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “tap widespread anti-Wall Street sentiment and voter anger about economic disparity without scaring independents.”

That take on the Obama reelection campaign strategy is in line with what we’ve been hearing for months out of the White House, which previewed the concept to the Washington Post as early as October, just as the Occupy movement was getting underway.

The tension or perhaps contradiction with this strategy is that, as I’ve been documenting, this administration and the Democratic Party are not fundamentally anti-Wall Street institutions. They have deep ties to the financial services industry.

Aspects of that relationship that have surfaced recently include: Obama’s hiring as a top campaign aide of Broderick Johnson, who had been pursuing a lucrative career lobbying for the big banks; the fact that executives of Bain Capital have contributed generously to Democratic campaigns in recent years; and so on.

The latest interesting data point emerged this week in the form of an analysis of the bundlers to Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee performed by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). The campaign, to its credit, voluntarily released the names of people who have bundled – in other words raised money from their social and professional circles and sent it to the campaign in one large chunk — more than $50,000.

There were just 357 of these elite bundlers in the second and third quarters of 2011. And the second most represented industry after law was the securities and investment industry, according to the CRP analysis.

The 62 bundlers who work in that industry have raised at least $9.4 million for Obama and the DNC. That “at least” is significant because the Obama campaign specifies only a dollar range in its disclosures, with the top category being “$500,000+.” So the real aggregate figure may be considerably higher.

Among these bundlers are employees of big-name firms including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Citigroup.

It’s worth emphasizing that for all the talk about grass-roots fundraising by the Obama campaign, the bundlers are a major part of the effort. The data released so far shows that at least one-third of all the money raised was sent in by a bundler, according to CRP.

The strong support for Obama from the financial services industries is not new. In 2008, employees of Goldman Sachs contributed more to Obama than employees of any other company.

None of this is to say that all of these bundlers are helping Obama exclusively out of self-interest – say, to protect their industries (or tax advantages) from tightened regulation. But it certainly prompts the question: If Obama wins a second term with these donors in his corner, how robustly will he follow through on his populist rhetoric?"

What is he hiding from?

Another excellent op-ed piece by Nicholas D Kristof in The New York Times - republished here in full.

"In a filthy Ethiopian prison that is overridden with lice, fleas and huge rats, two Swedes are serving an 11-year prison sentence for committing journalism.


Martin Schibbye, 31, and Johan Persson, 29, share a narrow bed, one man’s head beside the other’s feet. Schibbye once woke up to find a rat mussing his hair.


The prison is a violent, disease-ridden place, with inmates fighting and coughing blood, according to Schibbye’s wife, Linnea Schibbye Steiner, who last met with her husband in December. It is hot in the daytime and freezing cold at night, and the two Swedes are allowed no mail or phone calls, she said. Fortunately, she added, the 250 or so Ethiopian prisoners jammed in the cell protect the two journalists, pray for them and jokingly call their bed “the Swedish embassy.”


What was the two men’s crime? Their offense was courage. They sneaked into the Ogaden region to investigate reports of human rights abuses.


Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia’s increasingly tyrannical ruler, seemed to be sending a signal to the world’s journalists: Don’t you dare mess with me!


So the only proper response is a careful look at Meles’s worsening repression. Sadly, this repression is abetted by acquiescence from Washington and by grants from aid organizations.


Those Swedish journalists will probably be released early because of international pressure. But there will be no respite for the countless Ethiopians who face imprisonment, torture and rape.


I’m in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, and so is Meles. I’ve been pursuing him for the last few days, trying to confront him and ask him about his worsening pattern of brutality.


He has refused to see me, so I enlisted my Twitter followers to report Meles sightings. I want to ask him why he has driven more journalists into exile over the last decade than any other leader in the world, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York City.


Meles has done genuine good in fighting poverty. He has some excellent officials under him, including a superb health minister, and Ethiopia’s economy is making progress in health and agriculture. Ethiopia is full of aid organizations, and it has a close intelligence and military relationship with the United States government.


Yet since 2005, when an initial crackdown left 200 protesters dead and 30,000 detained, Meles has steadily tightened his grip. A Human Rights Watch report this month noted that the government is forcibly removing tens of thousands of people from their rural homes to artificial villages where they risk starvation. Those who resist endure arrests, beatings or worse.


“The repression is getting worse,” notes Tamerat Negera, who fled to the United States after the newspaper he edited was closed down in 2009. “His vision seems an attempt to root out any dissent.”


Meles has criminalized dissent, with a blogger named Eskinder Nega now facing terrorism charges, which could mean a death sentence. His true crime was calling on the government to allow free speech and end torture.


Appallingly, the Meles regime uses foreign food aid to punish his critics. Ethiopia is one of the world’s largest recipients of development aid, receiving about $3 billion annually, with the United States one of its largest donors. This money does save lives. But it also “underwrites repression in Ethiopia,” in the words of Human Rights Watch.


Families and entire areas of the country are deliberately starved unless they back the government, human rights groups have shown. In Ethiopia, the verb “to starve” is transitive.


Look, I’m a huge advocate of smart aid to fight global poverty. But donors and aid groups need to ensure that their aid doesn’t buttress repression.


The Meles regime, run largely by a coterie from his own minority Tigrayan ethnicity, has been particularly savage in the Ogaden region, where it faces an armed uprising. When Jeffrey Gettleman, a colleague at The New York Times, went to the Ogaden in 2007, he found a pattern of torture and rape. The government then arrested Gettleman and two colleagues, detaining them for five days in harsh conditions.


The two Swedish reporters illegally entered the Ogaden and met a rebel group to examine that human rights wasteland. In December, they were sentenced to 11-year terms.


Steiner, Schibbye’s wife, said of the harsh conditions: “Eleven years in an Ethiopian prison is equal to life, because you do not survive that long.”


Amnesty International says that in the last 11 months, the government has arrested at least 114 Ethiopian journalists and opposition politicians. It described this as “the most far-reaching crackdown on freedom of expression seen in many years in Ethiopia.”


Prime Minister Meles, you may have dodged me in Davos, but your brutality toward Swedish, American and Ethiopian journalists will not silence the world’s media. You’re just inviting more scrutiny."

The Public Eye Awards...to corporate villians

There are villians out there - and they aren't necessarily human.    Corporations can be too.   The Public Eye Awards have been given and are reported on here on CommonDreams.

"Brazilian mining giant Vale and UK-based Barclays bank were given the dubious honor of being the top vote-getters in this year's survey asking participants to name the world's most destructive international corporations. The results of the survey are gathered by The Public Eye, an effort organized jointly by the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland, and announced annually at an awards ceremony held during the World Economic Forums's gathering in the Swiss town of Davos.
 
Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor, Columbia University, speaks during the 'Public Eye Awards' on the sideline of the 42nd annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland. "With these nominations," he said, "Some of the worst examples of corporate irresponsibility in the last year have been identified."
 
The purpose of the awards, according to the The Public Eye website, are to highlight "the particularly flagrant human rights abuses and environmental harm by corporations."

"The deregulation of world markets has greatly expanded the range of transnational corporations. This change has come about at such a rapid pace that national laws have long lost their ability to impose an orderly framework. The voluntary restraint or social/environmental commitment pledged by companies is often not worth the glossy paper it is printed on. Patents that price life-saving drugs out of reach of poor populations, natural resources exploited without regard for the local environment, or workers exploited ruthlessly in a race to the bottom, you name it – there is nothing that the global players assembled in Davos will not do to improve their bottom line. It is more important than ever to remind corporations of their social and environmental responsibility. We want a legal framework that will hold them accountable for their practices."