Category: American Empire

The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.

By David G. Savage / LA Times / May 21, 2012

WASHINGTON — More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University.

Its sponsors say it is by far the largest database of such cases, and they hope it will help reveal why the criminal justice system sometimes misfires, prosecuting and convicting the innocent.

“The more we learn about false convictions, the better we’ll be at preventing them,” said Samuel Gross, a University of Michigan law professor.

See here for Chicago braces for final day of anti-NATO protests as demonstrators march on Boeing HQ

Reuters / May 20, 2012

Nearly 50 U.S. military veterans at an anti-NATO rally in Chicago threw their service medals into the street on Sunday, an action they said symbolized their rejection of the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of the veterans, many wearing military uniform shirts over black anti-war t-shirts, choked back tears as they explained their actions. Others folded an American flag while a bugle played “Taps,” which is typically performed at U.S. military funerals.

This weekend is the crazy weekend for Chicago. NATO is meeting about Afghanistan, protests are happening, nurses storm the streets demanding taxes on the rich wearing Robin Hood masks on, Iraq and Afganistan veterans are throwing away their medals in protest of the wars – and now, an attempt to trump it all, we have “terrorism” charges against some activists which are being met with swift denials and charges of “set up”.

President Obama had a sleep-over for world leaders at Camp David, getting ready for a G8 meeting on Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, dozens of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars plan on leading a march of thousands on Sunday, May 21, alongside Vietnam veterans, and will be presenting their medals to NATO officials during. This anti-war march will proceed through Chicago’s downtown area to the convention center where NATO is holding its summit.

And of course, inside the summit will be President Obama and other world leaders. The City of Chicago is bracing for major protests. Organizers are hoping the rally, which caps a week-long series of anti-NATO actions, will draw thousands. The Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam veterans will hold a reconciliation

WASHINGTON — A judge may have found unconstitutional the law that allows people to be held indefinitely without trial by…

From Democray Now / May 17, 2012

AMY GOODMAN: A federal judge Wednesday struck down part of a controversial law signed by President Obama that gave the government the power to indefinitely detain anyone it considers a terrorism suspect anywhere in the world without charge or trial, including U.S. citizens. The ruling came in a lawsuit challenging the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, filed by a group of journalists, scholars and political activists including Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Naomi Wolf and Cornel West [correction: Wolf and West are not plaintiffs but in the process of becoming plaintiffs].

Judge Katherine Forrest of the Southern District of New York struck down the indefinite detention provision, saying it likely violates the First and Fifth Amendments of U.S. citizens. The judge rejected the Obama administration’s argument that the NDAA merely reaffirmed an existing law recognizing the military’s right to perform certain routine duties.

By Barbara Ehrenreich / TomDispatch / May 17, 2012

Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene. But as Business Week helpfully pointed out in 2007, the poor in aggregate provide a juicy target for anyone depraved enough to make a business of stealing from them.

The trick is to rob them in ways that are systematic, impersonal, and almost impossible to trace to individual perpetrators. Employers, for example, can simply program their computers to shave a few dollars off each paycheck, or they can require workers to show up 30 minutes or more before the time clock starts ticking.

Suit Against NDAA by Writers Including Chris Hedges Wins Temporarily Victory

By Bob Van Voris and Patricia Hurtado / Bloomberg/ May 17, 2012

Opponents of a U.S. law they claim may subject them to indefinite military detention for activities including news reporting and political activism persuaded a federal judge to temporarily block the measure.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan yesterday [May 16] ruled in favor of a group of writers and activists who sued President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Defense Department, claiming a provision of the National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law Dec. 31, puts them in fear that they could be arrested and held by U.S. armed forces.

By Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Last New Year’s Eve, while most Americans were out celebrating, President Obama signed into law the most potentially oppressive national security legislation considered in our country since the onset of the war on terror more than 10 years ago. The National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA) includes military detention provisions that, along with the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), could enable any future president to suspend the right to trial and detain Americans indefinitely in military custody without trial.

If you thought the PATRIOT Act was bad, the NDAA is even worse. It could be used to criminalize any political party or ideology, round up ethnic minorities, enable recurring torture in military custody, or suspend the right to trial for people the government wants to detain (for whatever reason) without having to establish proof of any crime.

By John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food / May 12, 2012

In this article we explore how the price of gas at the pump is determined. This is an opaque subject which has been heaped in layers of obfuscation because the oil companies don’t want you to know what a huge scam they are perpetrating on the American public systematically ripping them off at the gas tank. They want you to think that gas prices are set by immutable, impersonal factors like the “world oil market” over which we have no control nor ever could we.

When the oil company executives went before a Congressional hearing in May 2011 as gas prices hit $4.00 a gallon, Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, was asked “how are oil prices set?” He responded that they were based on the marginal cost of producing the next barrel of oil. Nothing could be further from the reality of the situation although it would be a worthy aspirational ideal, something to shoot for in a more perfect world.

By Nick R. Martin / TPM / May 10, 2012

At a big news conference in downtown Phoenix on Thursday, the Justice Department’s top civil rights lawyer described Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office as an agency out of control.

“At its core, this is an abuse of power case,” assistant attorney general Thomas Perez said while announcing a massive civil rights lawsuit against the Arizona lawman.

But despite the tough talk, the reality is that little in the sheriff’s office is likely to change anytime soon because, as Perez acknowledged, the lawsuit could take years to resolve.

How the battle between the macrobrew behemoths and the craftbrew insurgents reflects a path for America’s troubled economy.

By David Sirota / Salon / May 9, 2012

The grand unifying theory of the American consumer has been that we are, first and foremost, low price fetishists. There’s ample evidence supporting this view: From Wal-Mart’s prominence to the fast food industry’s ongoing success, vast swaths of the economy are indeed built on the premise that buyers will prioritize discounts and quantity over premium prices and quality.

But ever so quietly, we are starting to see the rise and success of a competing vision, one that turns the old assumption on its head.

By James Hansen / New York Times / May 9, 2012

GLOBAL warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening. That is why I was so troubled to read a recent interview with President Obama in Rolling Stone in which he said that Canada would exploit the oil in its vast tar sands reserves “regardless of what we do.”

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.