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Monsanto’s genetically modified sweet corn will soon be arriving on grocery store shelves of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart Stores, Inc., and will not be labeled as such. Despite an onslaught of consumer pressure, the company confirmed late last week with the Chicago Tribune that it has no objection to selling the new crop of Monsanto’s genetically modified (GE) sweet corn.
Here is a video from Occupy Wall Street. Plans are being made to hold a three day festival of protest and resistance beginning September 17th – the one year anniversary of the birth of the occupy movement in New York City.
By Nick Pinto / Village Voice / August 8, 2012
The question being argued in federal court in Lower Manhattan yesterday boiled down to this: Is a law authorizing the indefinite military detention of American citizens with only the barest recourse to civil courts constitutional?
[The California Ballot Initiative to label genetically engineered food is] “a serious, long-term threat to the viability of agricultural biotechnology. Defeating the Initiative is GMA’s single highest priority this year.” — Pamela Bailey, President of Grocery Manufacturers Association, speech to the American Soybean Association, July 9, 2012
This November, Californians will vote for or against Prop 37, the California Right to Know Genetically Engineered Food Act.
By Barry Ladendorf
In many parts of the world, people will pause to commemorate what happened 67 years ago on August 6, 1945, when the United States unleashed the most diabolical weapon in the history of mankind on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later on August 9th, the same hellish fire consumed the city of Nagasaki. It is estimated that 250,000 people died as a result of the bombs.
by John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press
Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was very good at making money for Mitt Romney.
At the same time, it loaded companies Bain bought with debt, borrowed even more money to pay dividends to Mitt Romney and destroyed or outsourced lots of jobs. It even raided pension funds. Then Romney turns around and holds himself up as a “successful businessman.”
By Bernie Sanders / July 26, 2012 / Reader Supported News
The Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights held a hearing Tuesday on “Taking Back Our Democracy: Responding to Citizens United and the Rise of Super PACs”.
Here is Sen. Bernie Sanders’ testimony:
Mr. Chairman, thank you for convening a hearing on the monumentally important issue of “Taking Back Our Democracy.” Unfortunately, that title exactly describes the challenge facing us today.
The history of this country has been the drive toward a more and more inclusive democracy—a democracy which would fulfill Abraham Lincoln’s beautiful phraseology at Gettysburg in which he described America as a nation “of the people by the people for the people.”
Hey boys and girls! Here’s a bevy of progressive pundits – all pontificating:
Noam Chomsky: Shredding the Magna Carta
Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.
A couple of weeks ago the Northeast was in the grip of a severe heat wave. As I write this, however, it’s a fairly cool day in New Jersey, considering that it’s late July. Weather is like that; it fluctuates.
Something very interesting is happening. There’s been so much corruption on Wall Street in recent years, and the federal government has appeared to be so deeply complicit in many of the problems, that many people have experienced something very like despair over the question of what to do about it all.
By Conor Friedersdorf / The Atlantic / Jul 25, 2012
A collaborative investigation launched by law clinics at four top universities has assembled damning evidence of widespread misconduct.
An investigation undertaken by law clinics at NYU, Fordham, Harvard, and Stanford has concluded, after eight months of study, that the NYPD abused Occupy Wall Street protesters and violated their rights on numerous occasions during the 2011 protests that radiated out from Zuccotti Park. Their report, Suppressing Protest: Human Rights Violations in the U.S. Response to Occupy Wall Street, was released today. It focuses on transgressions against international law.
By Michael Moore / July 25, 2012
Since Cain went nuts and whacked Abel, there have always been those humans who, for one reason or another, go temporarily or permanently insane and commit unspeakable acts of violence. There was the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who during the first century A.D. enjoyed throwing victims off a cliff on the Mediterranean island of Capri. Gilles de Rais, a French knight and ally of Joan of Arc during the middle ages, went cuckoo-for-Cocoa Puffs one day and ended up murdering hundreds of children. Just a few decades later Vlad the Impaler, the inspiration for Dracula, was killing people in Transylvania in numberless horrifying ways.
In modern times, nearly every nation has had a psychopath or two commit a mass murder, regardless of how strict their gun laws are – the crazed white supremacist in Norway one year ago Sunday, the schoolyard butcher in Dunblane, Scotland, the École Polytechnique killer in Montreal, the mass murderer in Erfurt, Germany … the list seems endless.
And now the Aurora shooter last Friday. There have always been insane people, and there always will be.
Wall Street got bailed out. Cities got sold out. Federal policies keeping interest rates low are resulting in extracting wealth from cities and transferring it to Wall Street.
We blogged earlier about how traders from JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs descended on European cities such as Casino, Italy and even nunneries selling them interest rate swaps. Interest rate swaps were also responsible for bankrupting Jefferson County, the county seat of Birmingham, Alabama. Now the same big banks are bankrupting California cities. Stockton, San Bernadino and Mammoth Lakes have already gone down. Oakland is fighting Goldman for its very life.
But what does this have to do with the LIBOR scandal, you say? A lot, it turns out. LIBOR stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, a benchmark that most other interest rates are tied to including interest rate swaps, the very derivative financial instruments that are now bankrupting California cities.
By Marjorie Cohn
The issue of immigration has been tossed about like a political football for some time. Democrats argue that migrants who have spent many years in the United States should be permitted to apply for lawful status. Republicans criticize these proposals as “amnesty.” But Congress has been unable to agree on comprehensive immigration reform.
Three and one-half years into his term, President Obama announced on June 15 a policy to halt deportations for many undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. They must be under age 30, have come to the United States when they were under age 16, have lived in the U.S. for at least five years, be either an honorably discharged veteran or a high school graduate, and have suffered no felony or “significant” misdemeanor convictions.
Ten days after Obama revealed his new program, the Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision on Arizona’s SB 1070. Arizona had enacted a repressive law aimed at “attrition [of undocumented immigrants] through enforcement.” Five other states followed suit and waited as the high court considered the constitutionality of Arizona’s law.
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