top ten anti-american corporate military psy-ops

Business Insider | Environmental activist Sharon Wilson showed up to an oil industry event in Houston last week and caught a startling glimpse into how the fracking industry approaches residents in towns where they drill.

Wilson recorded industry insiders confirming they hire military psychological operation veterans, and use procedures pulled straight from the Army’s counterinsurgency manual.

The first half of the following slide titles are pulled exactly from the manuals section on ASPECTS OF COUNTERINSURGENCY. The second half is our interpretation of how that directive would be employed in American towns.

The text in the slides is pulled directly from the manual as well, though references to government etc. are put in brackets and changed to [corporation] for context. The corporations are referred to as the counterinsurgency or COIN.

Legitimacy is the Main Objective: Insert the government of choice

“The primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance.

… All [corporations] rule through a combination of consent and coercion. [Corporations] described as “legitimate” rule primarily with the consent of the governed, while those described as “illegitimate” tend to rely mainly or entirely on coercion.

[Both] Their citizens obey the state for fear of the consequences of doing otherwise, rather than because they voluntarily accept its rule. A [corporation] that derives its powers from the governed tends to be accepted by its citizens as legitimate.

It still uses coercion for example, against criminals—but the bulk of the population voluntarily accepts its governance.”

Source: Army FM-34

Unity of Effort is Essential: Obtain full control of all government agencies

“Unity of effort must pervade every echelon.

… Ideally a counterinsurgent should have authority over all government agencies involved in operations. However, the best situation that military commanders can generally hope for is to be able to achieve unity of effort through communication and liaison with those responsible for the nonmilitary agencies.

There are many … organizations needing coordination. The [local government] must be key players in higher-level planning, while similar connections are needed throughout the chain of command.”

Source: Army FM-34

ows preliminary "use of force" results: maybe it's time to occupy the police state?

Forbes | When the first major evacuation of Occupy Oakland was ordered, and police responded in full riot gear, I wrote at the time:

A little friendly advice for the police: if you want a protest or a rally to dissipate, ignore it. Until it turns into a violent riot, ignore it. Even if it goes on for weeks and months, eventually people go home.

If you want to make the protests more poignant, more profound, if you want to swell the ranks of the protesters and give them even more legitimacy, attack them with tear gas and flashbombs. Arrest them en masse.

Even better, pepper-spray unarmed, nonviolent protesters while they sit in a line. According to James Fallows, police are claiming that the officer who pepper-sprayed a number of Occupy protesters at UC Davis Friday responded in self-defense during a tense moment. Here’s the picture he uses to illustrate the absurdity of this claim:

It’s almost as if the police here don’t want the protests to end. Instead of waiting for boredom or cold weather to siphon off protesters, or hell instead of just using zip-ties and arresting the ones who wouldn’t move, these guys nonchalantly pepper-spray a bunch of peaceful protesters in the face. Because they could.

a "use of force review", really?!?!?!

Video - UC Davis to "investigate the appropriateness" of what is obviously and conspicuously inappropriate.

BostonGlobe | The chancellor of the University of California at Davis said yesterday that the school was launching an investigation after “chilling’’ video images surfaced online showing an officer using pepper spray on several protesters as they sit passively with their arms interlocked.

“The use of the pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this,’’ Chancellor Linda Katehi said in a message posted on the school’s website.

Katehi said she is forming a task force of faculty, students, and staff to review the events surrounding the Friday protest in support of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and the police response.

“While the university is trying to ensure the safety and health of all members of our community, we must ensure our strategies to gain compliance are fair and reasonable and do not lead to mistreatment,’’ she said.

In the video, posted on YouTube and widely circulated online, the officer displays a bottle before spraying its contents on the seated protesters in a sweeping motion while walking back and forth. Most of the protesters have their heads down, but at least one is sprayed in the face.

Some members of a crowd gathered at the scene scream and cry out. The crowd then chants, “Shame on you’’ as the protesters on the ground are led away. The officers retreat minutes later with helmets on and batons drawn.

It’s not clear from the video what agency the officer who used the pepper spray represents. Officers from UC Davis and other UC campuses as well as the city of Davis responded to the protest, according to Annette Spicuzza, UC Davis police chief. Davis is about 80 miles north of San Francisco.

Spicuzza told the Sacramento Bee that police used the pepper spray after they were surrounded. Protesters were warned repeatedly beforehand that force would be used if they didn’t move, she said.

“There was no way out of that circle,’’ Spicuzza said. “They were cutting the officers off from their support. It’s a very volatile situation.’’

The tents went up on Thursday, and protesters were apparently warned Friday that they violated university policies.

Katehi said she is also asking for a review of the university’s policies on encampments to see if they allow students enough flexibility to express themselves.

"one-time" shows out at UC Davis...,

Video - Raw footage of UC Davis police being extra.

LATimes | U.C. Davis police pepper-sprayed numerous sitting protesters and arrested 10 of them as they cleared an Occupy Davis encampment Friday, an incident captured on video and visible on YouTube and other social media sites.

Police then left after ordering the remaining protesters to take down tents that had been put up Thursday, reported the Sacramento Bee newspaper.

The city of Davis has had an Occupy encampment for more than a month, but the movement this week moved to the UC campus, with a rally on Tuesday, students sleeping in a university building Wednesday, then tents erected on Thursday, the Bee reported.

University officials told the newspaper that protesters were told Friday morning to remove the tents, but not all did.

Friday afternoon, some 35 UC officers from Davis and other campuses arrived with protective gear, the newspaper quoted UC Davis Police Chief Annette Spicuzza as saying

Remaining protesters initially numbered about 50, but then swelled to some 200 during a confrontation with police, the newspaper quoted Spicuzza as saying.

Spicuzza told the newspaper that officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. The students were informed repeatedly ahead of time that if they didn't move, force would be used, she said.

"There was no way out of that circle," Spicuzza told the Bee. "They were cutting the officers off from their support. It's a very volatile situation."

99.99% v .01%: the data behind the Occupy movement

Video - Is it the 99% v the 1%

Guardian | Is it really 99% v 1%? It has become the rallying cry of the Occupy Wall Street movement - and the Occupy protests around the world. But is it true?

This is the data behind this animation, produced by Guardian interactive designer Mariana Santos. And that data does show some people have done better out of America's economic booms of the last 20 years than others - as this report from the Congressional Budget Office shows too.

When Americans are asked how US wealth is distributed, they think the very richest fifth should own up to 40% of the national wealth - and that includes 90% of Republicans surveyed. In fact, that richest group owns 85% of the nation's wealth. Those surveyed also thought the bottom 120 million people should own around 10% of the national wealth. The reality: 0.3%

In fact, the super rich - the top 0.01% of the population - own more of the national wealth now than at any time since 1928, just before the Great Depression. And the richest 1% of the US population? They own a third of US net worth.

In Bill Clinton's boom of 1993-2000, average incomes went up - just as they did during George W Bush's boom at the beginning of his presidency. But if you were rich, you gained even more: nearly half of all the growth in the Clinton boom years. Under George W Bush it was 65%.

There are now over 3.1m millionaires and the US has over 400 billionaires, more than any other country in the world. Who's at the top of that pile? Bill Gates with a net worth of $59bn, Warren Buffett ($39bn), Lawrence Ellison ($33bn). That's just over the combined budget shortfall of every state in the US for 2011

In 2010, the average American earned $26,487 - down over $2,000 in real terms on 2006. That's a drop of 5.27%, including inflation. If you were poor it's been an even bigger drop - the 24 million least wealthy households in America saw their average income go down by 10% From $12,276 in 2006 to $11,034 in 2010.

If you were super rich it went down too. The 400 wealthiest American households lost around 4%, including inflation Between 2006 and 2008 - the latest year we have the data - the richest 400's household income went down by 4% - if you include inflation. That's to an average of $270.5m per household Nearly 5,400 times the average household income in the United States.

Part of the reason average Americans have been hit so hard is where their wealth comes from. Before the crash, middle-class Americans had 65% of their wealth tied up in their house.. But the richest 1% of the population kept most of their wealth in stocks and shares and business. So, when house prices went south, many Americans found their wealth disappearing too.

“All engagements are transparent and attributable.”

NYTimes | The morning sun had barely cast its fresh light over Tampa Bay when Ardashir Safavi — born in Iran, a refugee to Turkey, educated in the mid-Atlantic states — was up and patrolling two dozen Persian-language Web sites, hunting militant adversaries in cyberspace.

His mission was to scan news reports, blogs, social media and online essays to identify those he viewed as “containing lies, misinformation or just misperceptions” about American military operations and Pentagon policy across the Middle East.

In recent months, Mr. Safavi and his teammates spotted posts that included doctored photographs of Osama bin Laden purporting to prove that Al Qaeda’s leader had not died in an American commando raid. They turned up blogs stating that the Pentagon was accelerating war plans for invading many Muslim nations, and others amplifying Taliban accusations that American troops rape with impunity across Afghanistan.

Mr. Safavi works as part of the Digital Engagement Team, established in 2008 by the military’s Central Command to “counter extremist ideology, promote cultural awareness and explain U.S. interests,” said Maj. David E. Nevers, the team’s chief officer, who must approve all responses before they are posted on foreign-language Web sites.

The team includes 20 native speakers of Arabic, Dari, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Russian, the latter a shared language across the Muslim countries of the former Soviet states of Central Asia. Given that Central Command is responsible for military actions in an arc of instability stretching from the Indian Ocean across the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, people here call their headquarters “Tampa-stan.”

The government’s expanding efforts in computer-network warfare, offense and defense are among the most secret enterprises carried out by the military and intelligence community. To counter the adversary’s use of the Internet, American cyberwarriors have hacked into extremist chat rooms to sow confusion, or to inject poisonous code to take down militant Web sites. Sometimes, they choose not to act, but silently track the online movements of jihadists to learn their plans.

In contrast, the Digital Engagement Team operates in total sunshine: all of the online postings carry an official stamp acknowledging sponsorship by Central Command.

The team’s operators “respectfully deflect baseless and often irrational insults, confront adversaries with factual evidence and expose extremist propaganda that might otherwise go unrefuted,” Major Nevers said. “All engagements are transparent and attributable.”

The only obfuscation is the use of online pseudonyms to protect the civilian contract employees from potential retaliation.

the whisper that turned into a roar

Video - RT two month review of OWS

OWS preliminary ideological results...,

Guardian | The Occupy London movement is marking its first month this week. It is routinely described as anti-capitalist, but this label is highly misleading. As I found out when I gave a lecture at its Tent City University last weekend, many of its participants are not against capitalism. They just want it better regulated so that it benefits the greatest possible majority.

But even accepting that the label accurately describes some participants in the movement, what does being anti-capitalist actually mean?

Many Americans, for example, consider countries like France and Sweden to be socialist or anti-capitalist – yet, were their 19th-century ancestors able to time-travel to today, they would almost certainly have called today's US socialist. They would have been shocked to find that their beloved country had decided to punish industry and enterprise with a progressive income tax. To their horror, they would also see that children had been deprived of the freedom to work and adults "the liberty of working as long as [they] wished", as the US supreme court put it in 1905 when ruling unconstitutional a New York state act limiting the working hours of bakers to 10 hours a day. What is capitalist, and thus anti-capitalist, it seems, depends on who you are.

Many institutions that most of us regard as the foundation stones of capitalism were not introduced until the mid-19th century, because they had been seen as undermining capitalism. Adam Smith opposed limited liability companies and Herbert Spencer objected to the central bank, both on the grounds that these institutions dulled market incentives by putting upper limits to investment risk. The same argument was made against the bankruptcy law.

Since the mid-19th century, many measures that were widely regarded as anti-capitalist when first introduced – such as the progressive income tax, the welfare state, child labour regulation and the eight-hour day – have become integral parts of capitalism today.

Capitalism has also evolved in very different ways across countries. They may all be capitalist in that they are predominantly run on the basis of private property and profit motives, but beyond that they are organised very differently.

OWS preliminary judicial results...,

NYTimes | The Bank of America lawyer laid down a patented rhetorical move heard in courts across America. Your Honor, this Orange County, N.Y., homeowner — a New York City police officer — didn’t make enough money to qualify for a mortgage modification. He didn’t send us the right documents.

He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t, and so we should be allowed to foreclose.

Justice Catherine M. Bartlett of New York State Supreme Court cut off the lawyer. You, she said, are telling me lies.

“Bank of America got a bailout, and this is an outrage, how this man has been treated,” she said. “Hard-working, middle-class Americans are trying to make it, trying to refinance with your bank.”

Either bank officials show up in person, the justice said, or I’m going to order them “here in handcuffs.”

Rage has acquired a cleansing power. Patience as a virtue is a hard sell at the burnt end of a four-year economic collapse. Zuccotti Park shakes, rattles and rolls; television yakkers chat about inequality; and the federal judge Jed Rakoff all but heckled the Securities and Exchange Commission last week for going easy on Citigroup misbehavior.

Then there is Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, caught in Month 5 of a face-off with the White House. President Obama dearly wants to seal a deal in which the nation’s largest banks toss over a few bales of cash — $20 billion to help with foreclosure relief — and the state attorneys general agree not to pursue sprawling and explosive legal cases against the banks.

The power of a 'people's library'

aljazeera | The "People's Library" was at the heart of the OWS encampment at Zuccotti Park, and has played a similar role in other large occupations, such as Los Angeles. It is the necessary complement to the actual physical occupation of urban space represented by the OWS movement. Many people might wonder why it's so important for protesters permanently to camp when the reality, especially as the weather turns bad, is that few people are actually doing anything at night besides sleeping.

But the point of the occupation is precisely to reconquer space that has been taken over, either by the state or by private interests - a kind of "eminent domain" of, by and for the people - and create a permanent presence that can engender and nourish the kind of community and solidarity that have so disappeared in the United States in the last forty years. By permanently occupying Zuccottii and other parks, the OWS movement created a space where people could gather, create libraries, share books and ideas, and even meals. Where they could plan for another world that isn't merely possible anymore, but the only hope for the survival of humanity as a civilisation.

The library, which took weeks to establish, reflected the uniqueness and power of the still young 99 per cent movement. "From the very beginning, the OWS encampments were not just gestures of protest thinly focused on making statements about the ills of society, but were efforts to build community where people were knowledgeable and participated in informed dialogue. The libraries, at least in Zuccotti and in Los Angeles, have been central. Here in LA a graduate student made her entire personal library available to occupiers. These libraries have contemporary theory, classical literature, incisive analyses, and all sorts of books that have been marginalised from the mainstream media and culture. But when the history of this period will be written, these are the books that will be remembered."

So much did the "people's library" idea resonate that the OWS library couldn't keep up with all the donations they've received and encouraging people to take books out. The website lists some of the newest arrivals in the days before the raid: Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia, by Savo Heleta, Nuclear Nebraska, by Susan Cragin, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, From the Heat of the Day, by Roy A.K. Heath, Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns, and innumerable other books that were opening the minds of all who passed through OWS and the many peoples' libraries it has fostered across the country.

Minsky continued, "This open philosophy stands in stark opposition to the world of corporate culture. Trashing the library was symbolic of what the combined forces of Bloomberg and the NYPD feel about learning and the society in which we live." (Indeed, Mayor Bloomberg, who claimed full responsibility for the raid's execution, had to know about the library. Yet his "minutely planned raid" - as the New York Times described it - shovelled thousands of books into garbage trucks to be carted away to the nearest sanitation facility).

It also stands in stark contrast to the earlier iterations of the anti-corporate globalisation and anti-war movements, especially when it came to recognising the role of the Middle East in the larger processes of globalisation that were at the heart of the struggles of both movements.

New forms of culture jamming
In fact, I wrote the book I donated to the People's Library, Why They Don't Hate Us, specifically in response the abject failure of the emerging anti-corporate globalisation movement of the late 1990s, and then the anti-war movement that coalesced after September 11, to engage with the Middle East and larger Muslim world's role in the development of globalisation, or with the many scholars of the region who had the expertise and experience to help develop a more effective counter-discourse to both Clintonian neoliberalism and Bush's full metal jacket neoconservatism.

Ironically, Adbusters magazine and the culture jamming movement it helped spawn were at the centre of both the pre-9/11 alter-globalisation movement and the OWS movement today. The problem with the first iteration of culture jamming imagined by the movement was that it was mostly negative, focusing on critiquing or subverting political or advertising messages by "jamming" symbols into them that expose the usually ugly realities beneath the sexy, cool or comfortable veneers (painting a skull and cross bones over the face of a Marlboro Man billboard is a seminal example of this practice).

missing DA tied to sandusky case?

Video - Mystery of vanished Center County District Attorney Ray Gricar

FoxPhilly | The district attorney who didn't prosecute former Penn State coach Jerry Sandusky for sex crimes in 1998 went missing in 2005, a fact that is now getting a lot of attention.

Slideshows: Students Destroy Van | Student Protest | Rally At JoePa's Home | Coach Mobbed By Reporters | Suspects Surrender

Ray Gricar was the long-time district attorney of Centre County, the home of Penn State's main campus. He was months from retirement when he simply vanished on his way home to Bellefonte, Pa.

The mystery surrounding Gricar's disappearance in 2005 was the subject of several national TV shows and an effort involving the FBI and state investigators.

The attorney's car was found in Lewisburg, Pa., about 60 miles east of Bellefonte, about 12 hours after he called home. Several months later, his laptop computer and a destroyed hard drive were found.

But no one found Gricar's body.

Bruce Castor knew Gricar well. Castor is currently a Montgomery County Pa. commissioner and a former county district attorney who worked with Gricar.

"I never saw any evidence from Ray that he was showing any favoritism towards Penn State or the hometown or anything like that. He was a by the book guy," Castor said.

Fox 29 has confirmed the FBI has an open file on Gricar but it’s unknown if the case is still active.

But a missing person's poster for Gricar is still on the FBI Web site, even though Gricar was legally declared dead in July 2011.

So what happened to Gricar?

"I am now leaning towards the conclusion that it was foul play by someone who would have a motive to specifically target him," Castor says.

"If somebody really wants to get a prosecutor , they can. Especially in the country like that," Castor added.

Gricar appears in the grand jury presentment in the Jerry Sandusky sex-crimes case as the DA who didn't prosecute Sandusky after a six-week investigation in 1998 in Center County.

Gricar got the case after a boy's mother complained to police after her son showered with Sandusky.

According to the grand jury presentment, Penn State University police were also involved in the 1998 Sandusky case.

Gricar's office was the only local or state agency contacted about an alleged victim of Sandusky, a long-time Paterno assistant who retired in 1999 but continued to run a charity to help at-risk children.

So why didn't Gricar file charges against Sandusky?

thinking outside the genome...,

The Scientist | Not so long ago, the mention of any word with the two syllables “-ō-mics” tacked on the end was usually followed immediately with some response akin to, “Huh?” Today, we’ve gotten to the point where almost no biological phenomenon can escape “omics-ization,” and within the next 25 years, omics will be the biggest, if not the only, game in town. Why? Because we are about to undergo what experts call a phase shift, where a technology drives a fundamental change not just in what is known, but, more importantly, in how we think of ourselves. Put another way: omics is destined to change our patterns of living in ways that only technological revolutions can deliver.

Other technologies have already proven to have similarly deep effects on human culture. Consider the impact of the Internet on commerce, or the influence of GPS systems on travel and navigation. The reach of these technologies extended well beyond the information they generated. They redefined society.

In the last half century, the technology in genomics has provided us with a set of approaches initially as underappreciated as computers were in the early 1970s. “Exotic,” “finicky,” and “geeky” were terms used for mainframe computers that couldn’t even talk with each other. The same transformative technological advances that have turned computers into must-have personal accessories are inevitable for the nascent field of omics. Here are four ways in which omics will reshape the human experience.

can education research be divorced from politics and economics?

AERA-L | ABSTRACT: In response to my post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote (paraphrasing):

"I keep misreading the title 'PhysLrnR' of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is there but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs.""

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement on the PhysLrnR archive page , one of the issues upon which PhysLrnR is intended to focus is "Political Policy and Social Impacts on Physics Education Research and the Teaching of Physics."

If Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system IT CANNOT DIVORCE ITSELF FROM POLITICS AND ECONOMICS - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education" [Ravitch (2010, 2011)].
*********************************************

In response to my PhysLrnR post "Keynes & Hayek (was 'Re: History of regulation of finance')" [Hake (2011c)], PhysLrnR's William Robertson (2011) wrote:

"I keep misreading the title of this list, because I could have sworn the word physics is here but the words politics and economics clearly are not. Must be another of my silly non-sequiturs."

I think Robertson's misperception is due more to *non-cogito* than *non-sequitur*. According to the statement at the top of the CLOSED!:-( PhysLrnR archive page .
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Robertson evidently rejects issue "e" above: POLITICAL POLICY AND SOCIAL IMPACTS ON PER AND THE TEACHING OF PHYSICS" as a legitimate issue of concern for PhysLrnR and (presumably) Physics Education Research. I wonder if he would care to explain his rejection?

In "G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education" [Hake (2011a)], I wrote: "I agree that my post 'G.O.P. Anti-Federalism Aims at Education' is "somewhat political. But IMHO if Physics Education Research (PER) hopes to affect any change in the current educational system it cannot divorce itself from politics and cannot stick only to what Marx (2011) regards as 'teaching and learning' - both teaching and learning are heavily influenced by politics. . . . .[[and economics, see e.g., 'Re: Evaluations Ignore Education Factors,' (Hake, 2011b)]]. . . . . - witness the baleful effects on teaching and student learning of NCLB and RTT (Race to the Top) in K-12 as discussed in e.g., "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education"[Ravitch (2010, 2011)]."

In my opinion, PER's need to take a "systems approach" to physics education, consistent with the eloquent phrasing of Howard & Elisabeth Odum (1981), pointed to by PhysLrnR Bud Nye (2011):

"'Basic scientists,' who define *basic* as 'looking to the parts,' need to learn that putting parts together to understand whole systems is equally basic. The scientist who says that synthesis is 'applied,' as if it were an inferior activity, must ask which is intellectually more difficult and ultimately more basic, reductionism or synthesism. Surely both are necessary, but we have had too little synthesis, and our science curricula in schools have failed to fulfill their promise because of this. The scientist who uses his discipline to learn more and more about less and less must connect his specialty to the real world as an entirety. Anyone who sets boundaries to his field of interest is limiting his capacity to grow. An old discipline has already yielded what it can; now knowledge must be arranged in different ways and given different names...." Howard T. & Elisabeth C. Odum (1981)

Howard Odum is a "systems thinker" as evidenced in e.g., "Ecological and General Systems: An Introduction to Systems Ecology" [Odum (1994)] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_T._Odum. For more on "systems thinking" see "Over Two-Hundred Annotated References on Systems Thinking" [Hake (2009)] and "General Systems Theory" [Urner (2011)].

the dark side of science?

The Scientist | Within the burgeoning field of synthetic biology, teams of biologists and engineers are making great strides in understanding the cell and its functioning. (See The Scientist’s recent feature on the topic.) However, there is more that should be discussed than the triumphs. There are also the dark purposes to which science (and synthetic biology in particular) can be put. Worries range from the development of pathogenic bioweapons to the potential contamination of native gene pools in our environment. The question is, are scientists responsible for the potentially negative impacts of their work?

Some have argued that the answer to this question is no—that it is not researchers’ responsibility how science gets used in society. But that is sophistry. Scientists are responsible for both the impacts they intend and some of the impacts they do not intend, if they are readily foreseeable in specific detail. These are the standards to which we are all held as moral agents. If I were to negligently throw a used match into a dry field (merely because I wanted to dispose of it), for example, I would be responsible for the resulting wild fire. In contrast, Einstein was not responsible for the use of his E=mc² equation to build an atomic bomb and its use in wartime, though the scientists at Los Alamos were.

Of course, impacts (whether harmful or beneficial) are not solely scientists’ responsibility—others involved will also bear responsibility for their actions. If scientific knowledge is used in a biological attack, the terrorists are first and foremost responsible for their heinous act. But the researchers who generated the knowledge may be also partly responsible. Consider, for example, the knowledge of how to build a virus like smallpox from the ground up or how to create other pathogenic, tailored organisms—targeted either to humans or the foods on which we depend. If it is readily foreseeable that such knowledge could be used for nefarious purposes, the scientists who introduce such new technological capacities are partially responsible for an attack that could ultimately cause millions of deaths.

Scientists can no longer hope naively that people will only use science for the public good. The world will always have the mentally unbalanced, the delusional, the vicious, and the sociopathic members of society, some of whom will also be intelligent enough to use the results of science. Recognizing this should be part of the everyday backdrop of science, the assessment of its potential, and the desirability of the pursuit of a particular project.

pennsylvanian pederasty and procurement...,

Video - The People Under the Stairs trailer

Eurweb | The case was broken by one of Sandusky’s victims, cited as “Victim Number 1” who reported Sandusky to authorities.

Reports are also leaking out that the eight victims may have been poor inner city black boys.

Edward Wyckoff Williams, a columnist for the Grio, points out that many sex abuse cases in recent years have involved high profile leaders and victims of sexual abuse, who have been young black males.

Within the grand jury’s findings was an incident in 2002, when assistant coach Mike McQueary, the team’s wide receiver coach, witnessed Sandusky allegedly raping a boy, estimated to be about 10 years old, in the shower of Penn State’s locker room.

According to the Washington Post, McQueary told Paterno—and Paterno told athletic director Tim Curley and senior vice president for finance Gary Schultz, who, in turn, reported it to university president Graham Spanier. None took allegations to police.

The Pennsylvania Statewide Investigating Grand Jury stated that Sandusky selected the eight boys from the populations served by the Second Mile Foundation.

Poor children became easy prey for Sandusky, who would start with mentoring, then move on to hosting the boys for overnights in the bedroom at his home and then initiate copulation, anal sex, according to the grand jury report.

The report indicates that Sandusky may have raped and molested at least 8 young boys between the ages of 10 and 15 from 1994-2009. He is free on $100,000 bail and is awaiting his first hearing on Dec. 7. He has been charged with 40 counts of abuse, but maintains his innocence, according to his attorney.

If convicted, he would face a maximum punishment of life in prison.

Unbelievably, Sandusky, 67, was twice investigated on charges of sexual assault. Neither investigations resulted in either organization terminating Sandusky’s employment or access to facilities.

Investigators are also looking into rumors that Sandusky may have been procuring at-risk youth for foundation donors. The foundation raises millions of dollars a year from corporate and individual donors in Pennsylvania.

profound and pervasive perpetration in pennsylvania...,

Loop21 | As news unravels around the grand jury report revealing charges against former Penn State football defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky for raping and sexually molesting underage boys, some former black Penn State students are now painfully reliving a scandal that occurred at their university ten years ago. In 2000, the year a janitor witnessed a boy younger than 13 (“Victim 8” in a grand jury report) “pinned against a wall” while Sandusky performed oral sex on him, black students and football players on Penn State’s campus began receiving hate mail.

The hate mail sent to black students had nothing to do with Sandusky’s proclivities, but the two incidences shared something in common: both were ultimately covered up by the university, even as both chain of events grew worse. Sandusky went on to molest and possibly rape more boys, according to a grand jury report (Sandusky denies foul play), and hate mail against black students became death threats.

Ultimately, a black man’s dead body was found by police near Penn State as one of the death threats said it would. And some black students had to attend their graduation the following May with bulletproof vests on in fear of their life.

But few know about the death threats because Penn State and Joe Paterno were not willing to allow bad publicity to ruin the university’s image, say some of the black students at the center of the tragic events.

LaKeisha Wolf was president of Penn State’s Black Caucus ten years ago, and she received the lion’s share of life-threatening letters. Today, she watches the news about Sandusky’s rape charges, the firing of Joe Paterno and Penn State president Graham Spanier, and the student riots that ensued, and it takes her right back to her days dealing with the university.

In fact, Wolf and other concerned black students met with Paterno back in 2001 because of information circulating that black football players, like then-quarterback Rashard Casey, had been receiving death threats. Wolf recalls Paterno as almost emotionless.

coordinated crackdown with presidential plausible deniability?

firedoglake | Embattled Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, speaking in an interview with the BBC (excerpted on The Takeaway radio program–audio of Quan starts at the 5:30 mark), casually mentioned that she was on a conference call with leaders of 18 US cities shortly before a wave of raids broke up Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. “I was recently on a conference call with 18 cities across the country who had the same situation. . . .”

Mayor Quan then rambles about how she “spoke with protestors in my city” who professed an interest in “separating from anarchists,” implying that her police action was helping this somehow.

Interestingly, Quan then essentially advocates that occupiers move to private spaces, and specifically cites Zuccotti Park as an example:

In New York City, it’s interesting that the Wall Street movement is actually on a private park, so they’re not, again, in the public domain, and they’re not infringing on the public’s right to use a public park.

Many witnesses to the wave of government crackdowns on numerous #occupy encampments have been wondering aloud if the rapid succession was more than a coincidence; Jean Quan’s casual remark seems to imply clearly that it was.

Might it also be more than a coincidence that this succession of police raids started after President Obama left the US for an extended tour of the Pacific Rim?

OWS has learned why we call'em "one-time"...,

Video - riot police pull hair, punch, and use truncheons on Berkley students.

zunguzungu | At about 11:30 a.m. yesterday, a police officer told me and about eight other students that, and I quote, “the grass is closed.” We were going to sit under a tree and discuss things, and two police officers were watching us vigilantly to make sure we didn’t suddenly do something violent like try to put up tents. As we moved towards the tree, the first police officer stepped up and informed us that we could not walk from the broad concrete steps of Sproul Hall, where about a hundred people were sitting and talking, and sit on the grassy area just to the north of it. “The grass is closed,” she said.

If you meditate on these words until they become a mantra, you will learn some profound things about how police authority works. What could it possibly mean to declare that “the grass is closed”? Who could have the authority to say so? I had always considered that stretch of grass to be public; I’ve often been among the hundreds of students who eat their lunch there, every day, and 11:30 a.m. is a time of day when it is common to eat lunch. I have had conversations with other students sitting on that very grass, many times. Why was it that I could not do so now? Why had this stretch of grass suddenly become un-public and closed off? No signs said so, and no police tape marked it off. At the far end of that grassy area, in fact, several people were actually sitting on the grass. But those people were sitting there eating lunch. Because we were part of the group which was sitting on the steps of Sproul Hall, clearly, the grass had been declared off limits to us.

To make things more interesting, it immediately transpired that the other police officer had, in fact, already given them permission to sit on the grass. And in an instant, the arbitrariness of the rule was made evident and undeniable. Two different students indignantly asserted that that police officer right there told us we could sit here. When the second officer said nothing to contradict them, when he failed to back her up on the closed-ness of the grass, she wordlessly stepped back, keeping her face expressionless behind her sunglasses. She didn’t apologize or take back what she said. She simply stopped trying to enforce a rule after its utter and complete arbitrariness had been made clear. To put this as simply as possible, she elected not to use force in defense of a rule which had just been shown to have no basis other than the momentary decision of a police officer accustomed to telling people where they can and cannot stand.

As part of my ongoing private project to be less scared of police — because I am scared of police — I said to her, in as level and direct a tone as I could manage, “This is why we don’t trust you.” And she again elected to say nothing. She didn’t have to. The truth of power, in this situation, is that the policy is what the police will use their force to enforce. They don’t have to have a legitimate reason, nor are they embarrassed when it is shown that the “grass is closed” only because someone with authority said so. And the grass only became open because someone with more authority said so. Such people are not to be trusted.

This was a very modest lesson in how power works. On Wednesday, several thousand UC Berkeley students learned a much bigger lesson, but in many ways it was exactly the same lesson: the rule is what the people with the force to enforce it say it is. And it becomes the rule when you either obey it, or when they use their force to make you obey it. Fist tap John.

occupy where: what's in it for black and brown people?

Video - Main St. report Occupy the Hood/Detroit.

BAR | Those that initiated the early occupations in most cities were white. They have re-established the long-lost right of the poor to comngregate in public and express their discontent. If this is not to be a right which only whites enjoy, it's time for us to step up too. There will be race and class tensions, with the increased participation of black and brown people in the occupation movement. But these are growing pains, and necessary. It's time, as Glen Ford has said, to claim our place in the 99% and spell out what that looks like.

Occupation Where? What's In It For Black and Brown People?

The answer is plenty, and we need to hurry up and claim it.

The tactic of “occupation” has reclaimed is the right of poor and jobless, even homeless, people to congregate, to assemble and to be discontented in public. That's no small thing, and it's surely not a thing that could have been accomplished if the first occupiers had been young, jobless and black or brown instead of white.

If the first occupiers in Zucotti Park had been young and black, they'd instantly have been branded a street gang and arrested en masse, with or without violence, but certainly with little media play or sympathy. If the first occupiers were black, and blathering about the ravages of finance capital and how neither of the two parties were worth a damn, they certainly would not have been endorsed by what passes for the preacher-infested local leadership of black communities. Tied as they are to corporate philanthropy, corporate financing, the corporate-run Democratic party and its corporate-friendly trickle-down black president, our black misleadership class would have run, not walked away from black occupiers who failed to identify as staunch pro-Obama Democrats.

What if the occupiers had been brown? Here's a clue. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of immigrants at a time have stayed away from work in near general-strike proportions to march on May Day, no less, for their human rights. The anecdotal evidence is that ICE agents raided many workplaces in California, Texas, New York, Arizona, Illinois and elsewhere, and that without much notice in the corporate media, a wave of retaliatory harrassment, jailings and deportations ensued. Certainly, the Obama administration is on track to deport a record 400,000 immigrants for the third year in a row, already far outstripping Bush's eight year total. There are in fact, gang injunction-type laws in many states which make it a criminal offense for young people in designated (black and brown) neighborhoods to assemble in groups in public places for any reason.

Make no mistake about it, reclaiming the right of the poor, jobless and discontented to peaceably assemble, while politically paralyzing mayors and police forces used to cracking heads and dispersing malcontents is a project only white protesters could have accomplished without police violence and massive arrests. Fist tap Nomad.

you can't evict an idea

aljazeera | Bloomberg News was standing by as its founder Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered his Cossacks in riot gear to “cleanse” Zuccotti Park in the middle of the morning to replace one group of occupiers with another.

No doubt emboldened by earlier evictions in Oakland and Portland, and with a sound truck emitting noise to disorient protestors and add to the chaos, Bloomberg's office was saying, “protesters can return after the park is cleared”.

Until this point, the mayor had gone back and forth with threats to clear the park in the name of preserving public safety, of course, and upholding the wishes of the huge Brookfield Realty group, which owns the “public” park and on whose board Bloomberg's girlfriend sits.

For weeks, the Murdoch press had been baiting Bloomberg as weak and a wuss for not getting tough as they focused on any act of depravity they could find or invent. But now, the park is gone - for now - but the Movement says it will go on.

As the cops and the Sanitation Department dismantled tents and occupied the area, keeping pedestrians out, the Occupy Wall Street media team was issuing a statement that began, ”You can't evict an idea whose time has come”.

The statement continued: “This burgeoning movement is more than a protest, more than an occupation, and more than any tactic. The 'us' in the movement is far broader than those who are able to participate in physical occupation. The movement is everyone who sends supplies, everyone who talks to their friends and families about the underlying issues, everyone who takes some form of action to get involved in this civic process.

"Such a movement cannot be evicted. Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces - our spaces - and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve us, the people - all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth and power. We believe that is a highly popular idea, and that is why so many people have come so quickly to identify with Occupy Wall Street and the 99 per cent movement.”

The mayor acted after authorities in Oakland, California and Portland, Oregon evicted occupation activists from camps there. In both cities, activists have seized new parks and areas to use as launching pads for more protests.

a tactical note to OWS from culture jammers HQ...,

AdBusters | Hey you creatives, artists, environmentalists, workers, moms, dads, students, malcontents, do-gooders and aspiring martyrs in the snow:

The last four months have been hard fought, inspiring and delightfully revolutionary. We brought tents, hunkered down, held our assemblies, and lobbed a meme-bomb that continues to explode the world's imagination. Many of us have never felt so alive. We have fertilized the future with our revolutionary spirit … and a thousand flowers will surely bloom in the coming Spring.

But as winter approaches an ominous mood could set in … hope thwarted is in danger of turning sour, patience exhausted becoming anger, militant nonviolence losing its allure. It isn't just the mainstream media that says things could get ugly. What shall we do to keep the magic alive?

Here are a couple of emerging ideas:

STRATEGY #1: We summon our strength, grit our teeth and hang in there through winter … heroically we sleep in the snow … we impress the world with our determination and guts … and when the cops come, we put our bodies on the line and resist them nonviolently with everything we've got.

STRATEGY #2: We declare "victory" and throw a party … a festival … a potlatch … a jubilee … a grand gesture to celebrate, commemorate, rejoice in how far we've come, the comrades we've made, the glorious days ahead. Imagine, on a Saturday yet to be announced, perhaps our movement's three month anniversary on December 17, in every #OCCUPY in the world, we reclaim the streets for a weekend of triumphant hilarity and joyous revelry.

We dance like we've never danced before and invite the world to join us.

Then we clean up, scale back and most of us go indoors while the die-hards hold the camps. We use the winter to brainstorm, network, build momentum so that we may emerge rejuvenated with fresh tactics, philosophies, and a myriad projects ready to rumble next Spring.

Whatever we do, let's keep our revolutionary spirit alive … let's never stop living without dead time.

for the wild,
Culture Jammers HQ

occupy foreclosures: the next logical step after park camping ends...,

NewDeal 2.0 | As people think a bit more critically about what it means to “occupy” contested spaces that blur the public and the private and the boundaries between the 99% and the 1%, and as they also think through what Occupy Wall Street might do next, I would humbly suggest they check out the activism model of Project: No One Leaves. It exists in many places, especially in Massachusetts — check out this Springfield version of it — and grows out of activism pioneered by City Life Vida Urbana. It is similar to activism done by the group New Bottom Line and other foreclosure fighters. Here is PBS NewsHour’s coverage of the movement.

The major goal of Project: No One Leaves is to mobilize as many resources as possible to protect those going through foreclosure and keep them in their homes as long as possible in order to give them maximum bargaining power against the banks. For those focused on “weapons of the weak,” this moment — with banks and creditors using state power to conduct massive amounts of foreclosures, thus impoverishing poor neighborhoods through a financialized rationality — is a crucial opportunity for resistance.

nypd begins clearing zuccotti park...,

Video - NYPD midnight raid on Zuccotti park.

NYTimes | Hundreds of New York City police officers began clearing Zuccotti Park of the Occupy Wall Street protesters early Tuesday, telling the people there that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” before the morning and that any demonstrator who did not leave would be arrested.

The protesters, about 200 of whom have been staying in the park overnight, resisted with chants of “Whose park? Our park!” as officers began moving in and tearing down tents. The protesters rallied around an area known as “the kitchen” near the middle of the park and began building barricades with tables and pieces of scrap wood.

The officers, who had gathered between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and then rode in vans along Broadway, moved into the one-square-block park shortly after 1 a.m.

As they did, dozens of protesters linked arms and shouted “No retreat, no surrender,” “This is our home” and “Barricade!” At least a couple of arrests were reported just outside the park, but details were not immediately available.

The mayor’s office sent out a message on Twitter at 1:19 a.m. saying: “Occupants of Zuccotti should temporarily leave and remove tents and tarps. Protesters can return after the park is cleared.”

The police move came as organizers put out word on their Web site that they planned to “shut down Wall Street” with a demonstration on Thursday to commemorate the completion of two months of the beginning of the encampment, which has spurred similar demonstrations across the country.

the eviction of occupy oakland emboldened mayor bloomberg..,

Video - Police cleared out the Occupiers from Frank Ogawa Plaza in Oakland.

koch-blocked; occupy the koch bros...,

Video - Creative agitation and guerilla drive-in against a Koch 1% gala.

crypto-anarchism: occupy movement makes sense to ron paul...,

Video - Ron Paul on OWS at the last GOP debate

RT | While Republican attitudes towards Occupy Wall Street protesters have been largely negative, GOP hopeful Ron Paul aligned himself with those participating in the movement during last night’s televised presidential debate.

­In support of the agenda of the thousands of Americans participating in the Occupy movement, Texas Congressman Ron Paul said Wednesday night, “if you’re going after crony capitalism, I’m all for it.”

According to Paul, crony capitalists are those “that benefit from contract from government, benefit from the Federal Reserve, benefit from all the bailouts. They don’t deserve compassion. They deserve taxation or they deserve to have all their benefits removed.”

“But crony capitalism isn’t when someone makes money and they produce a product,” added the candidate. “That is very important. We need to distinguish the two. And unfortunately I think some people mix that.”

why hustler culture is doomed to fail...,

Video - Morris Berman, Part 1. Why America Failed


Video - Morris Berman, Part 2. Why America Failed

A Redux Request: Hakim Bey on Money

Black Sun Gazette | Peter’s talk was on money, specifically, a long historical view of money viewed through magickal / hieroglyphic lens. Like a lot of people I know and a lot of people I hear, he claims that he saw the whole economic collapse coming about a year ago. This is either an example of 20/20 hindsight on a massive scale or the collapse was that obvious to see coming over the horizen. I tend to believe the latter. Mostly because of something that Mr. Wilson himself said. “An important key to understand reality is economics.” People that tend to understand reality tend to understand economics- at least in the larger strokes. Still, I think it will forever confuse me why people like Mr. Wilson don’t do something with this knowledge. He claims that if he had a million dollars last year he could have twelve millions today. It’s not so much that I doubt the veracity of this claim so much as I lament it staying in the stage of the unverifiable. Money may not be wealth, but it can get you some very useful commodities like cigarettes, guns, food, land, housing, etc.

Mr. Wilson points out that “the Stone Age knows starvation but it does not know poverty.” In other words, there might be a famine, your village might get raided, there might be crop blight, but the village will either thrive together or starve together. The Stone Age knew starvation, but it did not know a parasitic ruling class gorging itself while masses outside starved to death. Money, Mr. Wilson says, begins as Sumerian clay tokens shaped into the tradable commodities (oxen, barrels of wheat, bars of silver, etc.). Records of debt (at usurious interest rates up to 33.3% annually) were kept by (who else?) the scribes and priests of the temples who at that time monopolized the art of writing. This kept not only the peasantry and laboring classes in debt peonage, it also kept the merchant class in thrall to the temple. Peter has considered the anthropological facts about money alongside the more mytho-poetic evidence existing from the time, such as the Babylonian creation myth of the war between Tiamat and Marduk, and the legends of Staghorn and Gilgamesh.

Clay tablets existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Specie, that is coinage, did not. This is an invention of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands. Here we see money gaining a more explicit religious and magickal quality. Gold was plentiful in this area, and is also a malleable metal easy to imprint with both words and images. When temple sacrifices of the local bull cults became so popular that not everyone could get a piece of bull, an ingenius method was reached to give every pilgrim a symbol of involvement in the ritual- the temple token. Rather than a piece of bull, pilgrims were given a small piece of gold with a bull impressed on one face. The two sided coin comes later with an image on one side and a caption on the other. Money becomes qualitatively more magickal with this step, uniting the image and the word into a talismatic object which has a value unrelated to its real value as commodity. It is no longer simply a magickal document recording debt and / or wealth. It is a magickal object whose value comes from belief. As Peter points out: All money is fiat money. Gold has no inherent value. It’s shiny, and makes cool jewelry and all that, but it is not what the anarcho-capitalist types will have you believe, a universal medium of exchange. Sure, it holds value over millenia (particlarly with regard to silver), but there is not reason to use gold more than say, diamonds or uranium or coal or any other commodity in limited supply. Quoth Mr. Wilson: “Money is proof that magick works, it is perhaps the only proof.”

corporations will eat your soul...,

Video - The Corporation documentary trailer

Yurica Report | Joel Bakan's book tells of a chapter in American history I was never taught in school. It involves a Marine Corps General named Smedley Butler, one of WWI's most heavily decorated soldiers. On August 21, 1931, Butler had stunned an audience at an American Legion convention in Connecticut when he had said:

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

"I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. The record of racketeering is long.

"I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three districts. The Marines operated on three continents."

Given that speech, and Butler's disgust with the role the military played, not in serving democracy but in serving the greed of large corporations, what happened three years later is truly stunning.

Franklin Roosevelt was president, and he was bringing government regulations in to stop the disastrous greed of the wealthiest corporations and individuals. Big business hated him. In fact, big business was in love with fascism at the time. In 1934, Fortune magazine had a cover story extolling the virtues of fascism and the economic miracles Mussolini had achieved in lowering wages, crushing worker unions, and creating greater profits for the corporations.

On August 22nd of 1934, General Butler was approached in a hotel room in Philadelphia by a messenger of a group of wealthy businessmen, who opened a large suitcase of $1000 bills and dumped it on the bed, explaining that this was only a down payment. The business interests wanted General Butler to assemble a volunteer army, take over the White House, and install himself as the fascist dictator of the United States, with the financial support of big business [see so-called Business Plot also known as the White House Putsch]. Some observers believe that if they had picked a different general, it may well have worked. Butler refused, and told the story.

In 1934, the business interests believed they would have to use military force to take over the government, dismantle democracy, and install a form of fascist government doing the will of the richest corporations and individuals in America, to the degradation or destruction of everyone else. This was the invasion of the body snatchers, coming closer than we can know to succeeding.

"Today, seventy years after the failed coup, a well-organized minority again threatens democracy. Corporate America's long and patient campaign to gain control of government over the last few decades, much quieter and ultimately more effective than the plotters' clumsy attempts, is now succeeding. Without bloodshed, armies, or fascist strongmen, and using dollars rather than bullets, corporations are now poised to win what the plotters so desperately wanted: freedom from democratic control." (p. 95)

And their reach is now worldwide. The World Trade Organization, which Clinton had created in 1993, has already sued or threatened to sue nations, including ours, for safety or environmental laws that cut into the corporation's profits. In 2005, their full power will come into effect, enabling them to prevent governments from enacting environmental or health regulations that would unduly impede their profits. (Bakan, p. 23)

NAFTA, another Clinton creation, was an investor protection plan enabling corporations to use cheap labor to force American wages down, break unions, and steal jobs from the U.S. society by the hundreds of thousands, "out-sourcing" them to cheap labor markets around the world in order to let rich corporations and individuals get richer by destroying the lives of American and other workers, gutting entire societies, then leaving their husk and blowing on to drain the life from another society, exactly like the invasion of the body snatchers.

There are many more details, and the picture is considerably worse, than I've had time to sketch for you. I don't think there are many books that all Americans should read, but I think this is one of them.

Is there hope? Can anything be done? Yes, but only if we remember that we created this Frankenstein monster, and it is only a "person" because we said so, and we can change our views and change our laws and change the way in which corporations are allowed to do business in this country and in the world. You can find lists of cities and counties that have revoked the charters of corporations, and refused to let them operate unless they are reconstituted to serve the good of society, the common good, rather than just the greed of a few men and women.

And New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer recently said that if "a corporation is convicted of repeated felonies that harm or endanger the lives of human beings or destroy our environment, the corporation should be put to death, its corporate existence ended, and its assets taken and sold at public auction." (p. 157) Eliot Spitzer isn't anti-government. He works for the government. The government isn't bad, it's a neutral but powerful tool that can be used to reclaim our nation and redefine the acceptable role of corporations in our world. We created corporations, we defined them, and we have the authority to redefine them, to insist that they may only operate in our society if they are organized to serve the greater good of the majority in our society, rather than simply the arrogant greed of a tiny percentage of us. They need to be taxed again, and taxed to pay a fair share of our economy's expenses, just as the tax rates on rich individuals needs to be raised. In 1960, the tax rate was 91% for the richest Americans, and corporations paid fair taxes. That is why our middle class was empowered after WWII, because the money was being distributed fairly. Today, we have socialism for the rich, and a brutal kind of capitalism for everyone else. We can stop it.

And now we're at war again, a war General Butler would recognize immediately. Haliburton, the company from which Vice President Cheney came back to Washington, has made billions of dollars from contracts they haven't even had to bid on. Other large US corporations that contributed to the presidential campaign have also made hundreds of millions of dollars. Some of their civilian truck drivers are being paid $80,000 a year to risk getting killed making profits for the stockholders.

Meanwhile, many of our American soldiers, as you may have read, are getting paid $16,000 a year, a pay so low that they are being given food stamps with their pay, and many of their families back home are on welfare. The soldiers are not fighting and dying for democracy, freedom, or anything noble at all. They are dying, like General Butler's soldiers died eighty years ago, as inconsequential drones whose only purpose in life is to help Haliburton, other major U.S. corporations and rich individuals make a lot of money. If they get killed, at least they're cheap to replace. There's cost-benefit analysis at work.

This is the story of the Frankenstein monster come full circle, to the point where it is succeeding in forcing its human creators to serve it, even if they become beggars or corpses by doing so. It is un-American. It is ungodly. It is inhuman and it is disgusting. And it is continuing. Only the American people are likely to stop it, and then only if they wake up, get informed, get angry, get organized and get going.

I can't write an ending for this sermon. It would have to be written in the real world, in real time, by real people. But there is something riding on our backs that doesn't belong there, and that does not have our best interests at heart. It will, if it is allowed to remain there, eat our soul and our society. Nor can it really stop itself. It has been programmed with a very simple program: it's just its nature.

the occupy movement busies itself in germany..,

Video - Occupy Reichstag thousands march in Germany.

why one-time needs to join OWS, not be swinging on them...,

Market Ticker | I told you so!

U.S. Bancorp was sued by an Oklahoma police pension fund over allegations investors in mortgage bonds were hurt by the bank failing to ensure that securities were backed by loans.

U.S. Bancorp knew mortgage loans underlying the bonds weren’t properly transferred to trusts and caused investors to suffer millions of dollars in losses, Oklahoma Police Pension and Retirement System said in a complaint filed yesterday in federal court in Manhattan.

The argument that US Bancorp will probably raise is that their duties were "merely ministerial" and that they're not responsible even if they knew or should have known that the securities were defective.

There has been limited success with this argument too.

The point I've been raising for more than four years stands: Public-service employee pensions are not going to be paid.  Not only were these people sold unicorn-style rates of return which cannot possibly be sustained the losses that were generated by all the scams and frauds are real and will be recognized -- and when they are, you're going to get a truly ugly surprise.

The police and firefighters should be marching with the Occupy folks, not opposing them.