Terry Collins, Associated Press

Now that a white former San Francisco Bay area transit officer convicted of fatally shooting an unarmed black man has been released from jail, he is also free on unsupervised parole.

Don’t Be Distracted by Weinergate: The Scandalous “Judicial Insider Trading” of Justice Clarence Thomas, Wife “Ginni”

Brad Friedman 6/13/2011

What Weinergate Interrupted: Clarence Thomas’ (ongoing) conflict of interest scandal (links archive)

The Reid Report 6/7/2011

Will Clarence Thomas Recuse Himself from Health Care Reform?

Mother Jones, Stephanie Mencimer 5/31/2011

at uprisingradio.org

Michel Martelly was officially declared the elected President of Haiti on April 21st. The pop-star-turned-politician takes office on May 14th. Martelly’s victory caps a protracted and highly contested Presidential race that required a March 20th run-off election. Allegations of fraud marred the entire election process, beginning before the first vote was cast in November. The exclusion of the Fanmi Lavalas party from running any candidates further tainted the process and spurred a voter boycott. Martelly won with 67% of the run-off vote – however overall turnout was dismal, with less than 25% of the electorate participating. Today the Provincial Electoral Council postponed the certification of results in 19 legislative races, citing widespread concerns over election irregularities, and even outbreaks of violence, over the announced results. Last week President-elect Martelly met publicly with US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton in Washington. Haiti Liberte newspaper reports that a significant portion of Martelly’s 6 million dollar campaign fund came from U.S. contributors. Clinton and Martelly discussed plans for rebuilding the earthquake ravaged nation, with a focus on the private sector. Clinton described the benefits of a planned industrial park in Haiti and announced its first committed tenant – a global textile firm. She estimated it would bring “20,000 permanent export-oriented jobs.” During his trip to Washington the Miami Herald reports Martelly also met with officials at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter American Development Bank, and he attended a social gathering at the US Chamber of Commerce.

GUEST: Brian Concannon Jr., director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti

Visit www.ijdh.org for more information.

by Junot Diaz

Published in the Boston Review

May/June 2011

“From the very beginning of its history, right up to the day of the earthquake, Haiti had a lot of help on its long road to ruination. The web of complicity for its engulfment in disaster extends in both time and space.

Whether it was Haiti’s early history as a French colony, which artificially inflated the country’s black population beyond what the natural bounty of the land could support and prevented any kind of material progress; whether it was Haiti’s status as the first and only nation in the world to overthrow Western chattel slavery, for which it was blockaded (read, further impoverished) by Western powers (thank you Thomas Jefferson) and only really allowed to rejoin the world community by paying an indemnity to all whites who had lost their shirts due to the Haitian revolution, an indemnity Haiti had to borrow from French banks in order to pay, which locked the country in a cycle of debt that it never broke free from; whether it was that chronic indebtedness that left Haiti vulnerable to foreign capitalist interventions—first the French, then the Germans, and finally the Americans, who occupied the nation from 1915 until 1934, installing a puppet president and imposing upon poor Haiti a new constitution more favorable to foreign investment; whether it was the 40 percent of Haiti’s income that U.S. officials siphoned away to repay French and U.S. debtors, or the string of diabolical despots who further drove Haiti into ruin and who often ruled with foreign assistance—for example, FranÇois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, who received U.S. support for his anti-communist policies; whether it was the 1994 UN embargo that whittled down Haiti’s robust assembly workforce from more than 100,000 workers to 17,000, or the lifting of the embargo, which brought with it a poison-pill gift in the form of an IMF-engineered end to Haiti’s protective tariffs, which conveniently enough made Haiti the least trade-restrictive nation in the Caribbean and opened the doors to a flood of U.S.-subsidized rice that accelerated the collapse of the farming sector and made a previously self-sufficient country overwhelmingly dependent on foreign rice and therefore vulnerable to increases in global food prices; whether it was the tens of thousands who lost their manufacturing jobs during the blockade and the hundreds of thousands who were thrown off the land by the rice invasion, many of whom ended up in the cities, in the marginal buildings and burgeoning slums that were hit hardest by the earthquake—the world has done its part in demolishing Haiti.

This too is important to remember, and this too the earthquake revealed.”

Tuesday 01 February 2011

by: Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed  |  The Cutting Edge | News Analysis

As first published at The Learning Machine

“…No wonder then that the chief fear of Western intelligence agencies and corporate risk consultants is not that mass resistance might fail to generate vibrant and viable democracies, but simply the prospect of a regional “contagion” that could destabilize “Saudi oil fields.” Such conventional analyses, of course, entirely miss the point: The American Empire, and the global political economy it has spawned, is unravelling – not because of some far-flung external danger, but under the weight of its own internal contradictions. It is unsustainable – already in overshoot of the earth’s natural systems, exhausting its own resource base, alienating the vast majority of the human and planetary population.”

Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in London. He is author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), which inspired the forthcoming documentary film, The Crisis of Civilization (2011).

Source URL: http://www.truth-out.org/the-great-unravelling-tunisia-egypt-and-protracted-collapse-american-empire67461

Internet connections across Egypt have been cut, as authorities geared up for a day of mass protest.

Net analysis firms and web watchers have reported that the vast majority of the country’s internet has become unreachable.

The unprecedented crack down has left millions of Egyptians without internet access.

There has been unprecedented protest in the country over the past few days – much of it co-ordinated via the web.

According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, shortly before 2300 GMT on 27 January virtually all routes to Egyptian networks were simultaneously withdrawn from the internet’s global routing table.

That meant that virtually all of Egypt’s internet addresses were unreachable.
Egyptian authorities are also reported to have stunted net access by shutting down official Domain Name Servers (DNS) in Egypt. These act as address books and are consulted by web browsing software to find out the location of a site a user wants to visit.

Messages circulating in Egypt pointed people towards unofficial DNS servers so they can get back online.
Mobile services are also affected.

A statement issued by Vodafone Egypt said it had been instructed to suspend services in some areas.

“Under Egyptian legislation the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it,” it said.

Unprecedented action

That sudden drop off has been confirmed by other web traffic watchers, including Arbor Networks and BGP Mon.

“The government seems to be taking a shotgun approach by ordering ISP’s to stop routing all networks,” said Andree Toonk, a researcher at BGP Mon.
People and businesses within the country that relied on the four main ISPs have been cut off, Renesys’ chief technology officer, James Cowie wrote on the company’s blog.

“Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air,” he wrote.

Severing the majority of a country’s internet connections represents “is unprecedented in internet history”, said Rik Ferguson, a security researcher at Trend Micro.

Jan 28 – National Post

Links to Full Coverage of Egypt Protests

NPR spent the past several months analyzing hundreds of pages of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records. What they show is a quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry.

The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

(click headline for full story)

Los Angeles Times: Detention centers isolate illegal immigrants and deny them rights, report says

This April 13, 2009 photo shows a detainee at Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga., leaving the cafeteria after lunch to go back to their living units. The all-male detention center with a capacity of 1,924 detainees is operated on contract by Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest private prison firm. (AP Photo/Kate Brumback)

10.2.2010

The education  reformer, John Dewey, defined as ‘mis-educative’ any experience that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience. The experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans (-gender & -sexual), and Questioning (LGBTQ) youth that involve physical, emotional, and verbal harassment; social ostracism, drug and alcohol abuse, unsafe sexual practices, and suicide, can be implicated by the chronic devaluation and endless barrage of personal attacks within and beyond the school context.

Altogether, these experiences constitute the ‘mis-education’ of a particular group of youth that breaches basic rights and entitlements to fair treatment as a human being.

The death of Rutgers University freshman, Tyler Clementi, is another clear example of the disparaging effects of harassment aimed at LGBTQ youth. Growing up as a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual or Trans youth in America has come to bear the weight of a perceived inherent flaw, and the burden is not getting any lighter. Findings from a 2007 National School Climate Survey conducted by the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network show that 60.8% of K – 12 students who were surveyed felt unsafe in school because of their sexual orientation. Nearly half had experienced some form of verbal or physical abuse.

These findings shed light on the pervasive nature of anti-LGBTQ sentiment that is sanctioned and attenuated by social forces that normalize the negative experiences of these youth. These consequences are exacerbated by ongoing social practices and beliefs that normalize heterosexuality and uphold it as the desired social standard.

Although the case of Tyler Clementi did not involve any form of physical harassment, the degrading and disparaging nature of the video recording and subsequent broadcasting, in addition to his roommate’s Twitter posts, achieved the same shameful and dehumanizing effects.

Shortly after his death, Rutgers students held a candle-lit vigil and staged a “lie-in” in solidarity. Mental Health America (www.mha.org) reports that the lives of LGBTQ teens are two to three times more likely to be cut short by suicide as a result of the stigmatization of the non-Heterosexual identity.

The narratives of many non-Heterosexual men and women are constructed with experiences of self-hatred, violence, and rejection by others. A participant in the YouTube project known as ‘It Gets Better’ directed a comment at struggling LGBTQ youth; “Your life can be amazing, but you have to tough this period of it out, and you have to live your life so that you’re around for it to get amazing. And it can, and it will.”[1] Sadly, the negative experiences associated with realizing an LGBTQ identity for oneself have become normalized in a post-Stone Wall age in the fight for humane treatment.

In our struggle to overcome forces that marginalize LGBTQ individuals, perhaps this is the point in the formation of a collective identity that gets worse before it gets better(?).

Full Article Here

“For example, just last week, my daughter—who is 8 and happens to be the only brown person in her Accelerated Progress Program class at Thurgood Marshall Elementary—was ordered out of the classroom because her teacher did not like the smell of her hair. The teacher complained that my racially different daughter’s hair (or something—a product—in the hair) was making her sick, and then the teacher made her leave the classroom. My daughter was aware of the racial nature of this expulsion not only because she was made to sit in a classroom that had more black students in it (the implication being that this is where she really belongs, in the lower class with the other black students), but because her teacher, she informed me, owns a dog. Meaning, a dog’s hair gives the teacher less problems than my daughter’s human but curly hair. Most white people do not have to deal with shit like this. Shit that if not checked and confronted will have permanent consequences for the child.”

We wish to express our deep concern with and unequivocal condemnation of Senate Bill 1070, which you signed into law April 23. By making it a state crime to be in Arizona without federal authorization, and making it a punishable offense to support someone without the appropriate documents, SB 1070 criminalizes countless decent human beings who live, work, pay taxes, and raise families in Arizona. The enforcement of such a constitutionally problematic law threatens everyone’s civil rights in the process, and undermines the potential for fostering an environment based on peace and social justice. We unanimously denounce this law and strenuously urge that you rescind it in the name of compassion and human dignity.

The decision to join together in issuing the open letter below represents an unprecedented and historical moment of collaboration. As academics and professionals concerned about social and environmental justice, human rights, and due process, we add our collective voices to those of many others from across the country calling for the immediate rescission of SB 1070 (and, as amended, HB 2162) and HB 2281 in the name of equity, compassion, integrity, constitutionality, and sound public policy.

We are all non-partisan professional organizations of scholars, educators, and practitioners with a collective membership of more than 10,000 people committed to and knowledgeable about a wide range of social justice and environmental issues, including some of the nation’s most knowledgeable professionals on the subjects of immigration and our legal and political systems. While immigration reform in the United States may be overdue, we also know that using this to justify state laws that usurp federal authority over immigration will create many more legal and social problems than it resolves.

The combined effect of SB 1070 with the prohibition on ethnic studies contained in HB 2281 creates an atmosphere of legislated intolerance and racialized politicking that is simply untenable, unwise and unjust. The simple fact that SB 1070 had to be amended, under pressure following its passage, by HB 2162 (which sought to qualify the conditions for officer contact) demonstrates quite clearly the inherently flawed and potentially racist implications of this piece of legislation. The purported “remedy” of requiring a “stop” before officers can inquire further about legal status based on a “reasonable suspicion” is equally expansive in its application, and thus equally problematic. These alterations, again adopted in haste following public pressure, will not provide sufficient protection against racial profiling.

Police officers are not immigration officers. Putting them in the position of enforcing federal immigration law will destroy the trust between police officers and communities so essential for effective law enforcement. It will also lead to unwarranted and prolonged detention of citizens and legal residents, increasing the likelihood of civil rights litigation against police departments, cities and towns, and potentially damaging family units across the state.

Despite language ostensibly prohibiting racial profiling, this will be the de facto reality of the law’s implementation. Physical appearance, particularly being of Hispanic background, will unavoidably remain the primary factor determining whether someone is or is not asked to prove her or his citizenship or residency status. For all these reasons, many law enforcement leaders across the country, as well as in Arizona, oppose this law. It would be wise to heed the objections of the law enforcement officers who are now faced with enforcing this unjust law.

For some, the stated intent of SB 1070 is to cleanse Arizona of its undocumented immigrants and their families, among them children and other relatives born in the United States. Legislative supporters of this law have repeatedly and proudly described this as part of a strategy to make life so unbearable for undocumented residents and their families that they will leave the state. Any law whose goal is to drive an ethnic population to leave its place of residence is a crime against humanity under current international law. The law will also separate cohesive family units and lead to increased marginalization among communities facing grave challenges. This bill risks making Arizona a pariah state on the national and international stages.

Whatever the intent, at minimum this law will create a climate of fear so intense as to make low-wage workers even more vulnerable, and therefore much easier to exploit by unscrupulous employers. Denying immigrant workers protections or otherwise making them more vulnerable does not stop them from coming. Rather, it simply drives them further underground and makes them more exploitable.

The climate of fear and hostility that this law will create is antithetical to the aims of promoting a more just and peaceful world. By institutionalizing chauvinism and magnifying differences of race and ethnicity, SB 1070 promises to enlarge the gulf between diverse communities and pit groups against one another, rather than encouraging people to work together to find mutually beneficial solutions to challenging issues. Sadly, the net effect of SB 1070 will be precisely what is sought to be prohibited under HB 2281 – it will in practice and principle serve to “promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.”

Opposition to this law has been rapid and strong, and is likely to become even stronger, as more and more groups and individuals boycott the state of Arizona and businesses based in Arizona. We are aware as well of the ostensible support in the state for the law, and therefore recognize the political pressures that led to passage of this law.

But widespread support for a law does not make it just; not long ago the majority of Southerners supported segregation laws. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from a Birmingham jail: “An unjust law is no law at all. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.” It is in instances like these that strong moral leadership is needed, and we are appealing to the governor, state legislators, and all concerned Arizonans to provide it.

Please choose to be on the right side of history and work to overturn this patently unjust law. We thank you for your time and attention in this important matter.

– The Consortium of Professional and Academic Associations, including the following:
American Studies Association (ASA)
Association of Asian American Studies (AAAS)
Chicano/Latino Faculty and Staff Association, ASU (CLFSA)
Justice Studies Association (JSA)
Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS)
National Association for Chicano and Chicana Studies (NACCS)
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA)
Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA)
Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)
Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS)
Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)
Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP)
Sociologists Without Borders (Sociologos Sin Fronteras) (SSF)