Saturday, August 6th, 2011
MIKE ELK and BOB SLOAN, - The Nation
Stephan: This is part of the New American Slavery trend being promoted by the Virtual Corporate States and their Rightwing Congressional and state level lackeys. (see the archives for my essay The New American Slavery on this subject).
This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series.
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for
Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporationthat operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are ‘designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.
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Saturday, August 6th, 2011
MICHAEL KUNZELMAN and MARY FOSTER, - Seattle-Times
Stephan: When this story first surfaced six years ago I ran it, and have kept track of what has happened since then. It has taken an unconscionably long time for justice to be achieved, but it has finally happened, and I consider this good news.
NEW ORLEANS — A federal jury on Friday convicted five current or former New Orleans police officers of civil-rights violations in one of the lowest moments for city police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: the shooting deaths of a teenager and a mentally disabled man as they crossed a bridge in search of food and help.
The case was a high-stakes test of the Justice Department’s effort to rid the police department of corruption and brutality. A total of 20 current or former New Orleans police officers were charged last year after a series of federal investigations.
Most of the cases center on actions during the aftermath of the Aug. 29, 2005, storm, which plunged the city into a state of lawlessness and desperation.
Sgts. Robert Gisevius and Kenneth Bowen, Officer Anthony Villavaso and former Officer Robert Faulcon were convicted of civil-rights violations in the shootings that killed two people and wounded four others on the Danziger Bridge less than a week after the storm. They face possible life prison sentences.
Retired Sgt. Arthur ‘Archie’ Kaufman and the other four men also were convicted of engaging in a cover-up that included a planted gun, fabricated witnesses and falsified reports. The five men were […]
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Saturday, August 6th, 2011
KATE ZERNIKE, - The New York Times
Stephan: Hopefully America is waking up to what these crypto-fascists -- most of whom are really just angry, fearful, and brainwashed -- have in mind for the country, goaded on by rightwing uber-rich individuals and corporations, who find them useful tools. We'll know with the results of the next election.
Little more than a year ago, most Americans did not know enough about the Tea Party to have an opinion. Now, more people have opinions, and they are hardly positive.
The percentage of people with an unfavorable view of the Tea Party in a New York Times/CBS News Poll this week was higher than it has been since the first time the question was asked, in April 2010. Forty percent of those polled this week characterized their view as ‘not favorable,
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Stephan: There are several of these alternative currency schemes. It will be interesting to see whether one of them wins through.
This July a computer developer who goes by the handle Doctor Nefario landed at the Seattle-Tacoma airport from China for a two-month mind-meld with various U.S. developers, which he planned to mostly fund using the increasingly popular decentralized digital currency bitcoin. After explaining to suspicious Customs and Border Protection agents that he had $600 in cash in his possession and another $1,500 to exchange in bitcoin — plenty for a two-month visit, he insisted — Nefario, founder of the Global Bitcoin Stock Exchange, was promptly sent back to China after agents spent hours trying to wrap their heads around the concept of real money that exists only in virtual reality.
‘Avoid any mention of bitcoin,’ Nefario advised in a blog post recounting the tragicomic affair. ‘They don’t like it at all.’
Good luck with that. Founded in 2009 from a self-published 2008 white paper by developer Satoshi Nakamoto, whose actual identity still remains a mystery, bitcoin’s peer-to-peer virtual currency has gone viral, from WikiLeaks to Google and beyond. It’s a fascinating experiment in economic evolution, where goods and services can be exchanged using an opensourced mobile currency mostly outside the reach of regulators, speculators and central bankers. There are over six […]
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STEPHEN C. WEBSTER, - The Raw Story
Stephan: It is just barely possible that years after the events, we may finally see some accountability for these obscene wars sucking vast draughts of money out of our economy.
A lawsuit against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, filed by an unnamed U.S. contractor who claims he was tortured by the military, will proceed to trial.
The decision made this week by U.S. District Judge James Gwin is especially important to civil liberties advocates, who’ve seen a number of torture suits against former U.S. officials shot down by claims of immunity.
In this case, originally filed in 2008, Judge Gwin considered a similar argument from the Obama administration: that a former official cannot be sued for their actions in any official capacity.
However, since the plaintiff in the matter is a U.S. citizen whose constitutional rights were allegedly trampled upon — and because Rumsfeld allegedly approved each individual harsh interrogation — the suit is being allowed to proceed.
The man, whose identity was withheld, is a translator in his 50s who helped U.S. Marines communicate with Iraqis. He claims he was abducted by U.S. military personnel in 2005 as he was due to return home from Iraq. Over the course of nine months he was allegedly beaten and interrogated about providing classified information to coalition enemies, then was released without explanation. He was never charged with a crime.
‘The court finds no convincing reason […]
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