New Buildings Proposed for Retailer's New Campus Digs
by Paul Haeder / May 15th, 2012
(Note – this is the first in a series of news reports, analysis pieces and interview and op-ed (from former Amazon warehouse “picker” Nichole Gracely, who’s from Pennsylvania and who was part of the Lehigh newpaper Morning Call’s great expose of Amazon’s sweatshop in the Keystone State that hit the newsstands September 18, 2011. So, hold onto your seats – this first one starts off mellow as I focus on a design review meeting recently held in the Emerald City to allow architects to present to the public more Amazon “building madness” in downtown Seattle.)
Sometimes these land use, transportation, design …
by John Andrews / May 15th, 2012
The almost unknown subject of False Flag events is slowly creeping into people’s conscious awareness; and about time too.
The term comes from a tactic that was commonly employed many centuries ago by all the navies of fledgling empires. Although these navies very occasionally engaged in heroic battles with each other in order to protect the citizens of their countries from invading hoards, as our history books suggest, the far more common use of mighty battleships was for theft. Sinking an enemy ship was never the intention of these engagements, and would have been seen as something of a failure. The …
by Shepherd Bliss / May 15th, 2012
After four years of teaching various humanities courses at Sonoma State University in Northern California, I’m sad to report that our school sank to a new low on May 12 by awarding the notorious banker Sandy Weill and his wife Joan honorary doctorates. The retired CEO of Citigroup, once the world’s largest bank, purchased them for $12 million. He gave that ill-gotten money to the Green Music Center, an essentially non-educational pet project of President Ruben Arminana, which recently has dominated fund-raising at SSU.
“These awards by SSU are reprehensible in light of Sandy Weill’s role in bringing about the …
by Bill Quigley / May 15th, 2012
US civilian and military employees regularly target and fire lethal unmanned drone guided missiles at people across the world. Thousands of people have been assassinated. Hundreds of those killed were civilians. Some of those killed were rescuers and mourners.
These killings would be criminal acts if they occurred inside the US. Does it make legal sense that these killings would be legal outside the US?
Some Facts about Drone Assassinations
The US has used drones to kill thousands of people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. But the government routinely refuses to provide any official information on local reports of civilian deaths …
by William A. Cook / May 15th, 2012
We dance round in a ring and suppose
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.
— Robert Frost
Victors’ celebrations harbor shadows that lurk in the soul as revelers dance in remembrance, burying in laughter the suffering screams of those displaced and destroyed, furiously hiding forgotten faces framed in fear from mocking the glorious dance should they be awakened once more by the reverie. May 14 and 15 are paradoxically days of celebration and catastrophe; victors “dance round in a ring and suppose,” caught in a never ending quest to know if indeed this celebration is for victory or for defeat, while …
by Kim Petersen / May 14th, 2012
Whoop dee doo! Barack Obama has acknowledged that gay people should have the right — as other human beings do — to marry. It is long overdue step in supporting every human’s right to form a love partnership regardless of sexual orientation. Obama wasn’t even a leader in his decision; it came after his vice president Joseph Biden had announced he was in favor.
To be sure, progressivism demands that LGBTQ share the same rights as every other person, and the United States president’s affirmation of that right is important, but it should be a given — not a sudden, monumental …
by Coy McKinney / May 14th, 2012
This paper is a critique of how the state, the legal system, and the criminal justice system function in American society, and calls for an anarchist approach to how society should be organized that will remove the oppressive frameworks we currently live under.
To support my arguments, I will first provide an overview of how the criminal justice system works. From there I will offer an analysis on why the criminal justice system is flawed, and the racially discriminatory effect it has had on society. I will then discuss why the disproportionate number of minorities found in prison and impoverished in …
by Linh Dinh / May 14th, 2012
Borges writes, “dictatorships foster oppression, dictatorships foster servitude, dictatorships foster cruelty; more abominable is the fact that they foster idiocy.” As a preeminent mind, Borges rightly considers the mind to be a man’s greatest asset, for without mind, a man is nothing. The more oppressive a political system, then, the greater its assault on its subjects’ minds, for it’s not enough for any dictator, king or totalitarian system to oppress and exploit, but it must, and I mean must, make its people idiotic as well. Every wrongful bullet is preceded and accompanied, then followed up by a series of idiotic …
by Daniel Borgström / May 14th, 2012
Just south of Albany Hill there’s a sizable piece of pristine farm land, grown up in wild mustard grass, surrounded by urban housing, known as the “Gill Tract” — what’s left of it anyway — the 104 acre Gill Farm, which has been carved up and developed piece by piece over the years, whittling it down to a mere 14 remaining acres. It’s the last such piece of farmland in this part of the East Bay.
Activists have been struggling for over a decade to save this land from development and turn it into a community farm. Finally, on April 22, …
by Tom Burghardt / May 14th, 2012
Amid recent reports that the bodies of four Mexican journalists were discovered in a canal in the port city of Veracruz, less than a week after another journalist based in that city was found strangled in her home, the U.S. State Department “plans to award a contract to provide a Mexican government security agency with a system that can intercept and analyze information from all types of communications systems,” NextGov reported.
The most glaring and obvious question is: why?
Since President Felipe Calderón declared “war” against some of the region’s murderous drug cartels …
Newly Discovered Homeland Security Files Show Feds Central to Occupy Crackdown
by Dave Lindorff / May 14th, 2012
A new trove of heavily redacted documents provided by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on behalf of filmmaker Michael Moore and the National Lawyers Guild makes it increasingly evident that there was and is a nationally coordinated campaign to disrupt and crush the Occupy Movement.
The new documents, which PCJF National Director Mara Verheyden-Hilliard insists “are likely only a subset of responsive materials,” in the possession of federal law enforcement agencies, only “scratch the surface of a mass intelligence network …
by Binoy Kampmark / May 14th, 2012
Where does it stop? God intended Adam and Eve to be a couple, not Adam and Steve.
— Jethro James, Senior Pastor at Paradise Baptist Church Newark, May 10, 2012
The gay marriage debate in New Jersey has gone national, with President Obama throwing his own hat in the ring with resounding approval for same-sex unions. Evangelicals are shuddering, and various pro-Obama supporters are shaking their heads. One is pastor Jethro James of the Paradise Baptist Church in Newark. ‘I don’t understand why he did it – and why now. I was gung-ho for his re-election and now, I don’t know. This …
by Gareth Porter / May 14th, 2012
IPS — In meetings with Iranian officials in Vienna this week, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) apparently intends to hold up agreement on a plan for Iran’s full cooperation in clarifying allegations of covert nuclear weapons work by insisting that it must first let the nuclear agency visit Parchin military base.
That demand, coupled with the IAEA’s insistence in the talks on being able to prolong the inquiry on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons work indefinitely, make the failure of the current talks very likely. Iran has made it clear that it wants assurances that the IAEA inquiry on the allegations will …
by Pepe Escobar / May 12th, 2012
Life is a golden gift from Allah if you’re a certified member of the Gulf Counter-Revolution Club (GCC), also known as the Gulf Cooperation Council; Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates can torture, kill, repress and demonize their own subjects – in full confidence the “master” will let you get away with it.
Just as the Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in power in Bahrain is vowing, publicly, to keep arresting, tear-gassing, raiding their homes, confiscating their jobs and forcing pro-democracy protesters to live in non-stop fear, Bahraini Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad al-Khalifa is being hosted in …
Part 2: Sustainability lite
by Paul Haeder / May 12th, 2012
Jason F. McLennan, CEO of the International Living Future Institute (home of the Living Building Challenge, a standard launched by the Cascadia chapter of the Green Building Council in 2006 and intended to push beyond LEED at the time). He just published a memoir about his own effort to live green, Zugunruhe: The Inner Migration to Profound Environmental Change (published by the ILFI’s Ecotone Publishing, 2010)
I spoke with Jason about green washing, what the cities of Vancouver, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, and others are attempting to do with architecture and urban design. We discussed how difficult it is to …
by Jonik / May 12th, 2012
Censorship to its extreme.
by Walter Brasch / May 12th, 2012
Last year, not one of the 491,687 new minivans sold in the United States was made in America by unionized workers.
Some were manufactured overseas by companies owned by non-American manufacturers. The Kia Sedona, with 24,047 sales, was built in South Korea, Russia, and the Philippines. The MAZDA5, with 19,155 sales, was built in China, Japan, and Taiwan.
Some minivans from Japanese companies were built in the U.S., but by non-unionized workers. Honda sold 107,068 Odysseys built in Alabama. Toyota Siennas, built in Indiana, went to 111,429 persons. The Nissan Quest, built in Ohio, had 12,199 sales.
Only three minivans were built by …
by William T. Hathaway / May 12th, 2012
Albert Einstein wrote in 1939, “There could be no greater calamity than a permanent discord between us and the Arab people. Despite the great wrong that has been done us, we must strive for a just and lasting compromise with the Arab people…. Let us recall that in former times no people lived in greater friendship with us than the ancestors of these Arabs.” Einstein was opposed from the start to the setting up of a Jewish state and to mass emigration into Palestine. He was also one of the signatories to an Open Letter to the New York …
by Graham Peebles / May 12th, 2012
Arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. This is the recipe for justice that the Ethiopian government serves up to dissenting voices, men and women peacefully exercising their democratic right, demanding their human rights, crying out for their moral rights. The victimised are not only those living within Ethiopia who attempt to offer an alternative to the current dictatorship, who form and organise political opposition to the Meles regime, but journalists inside Ethiopia and abroad, who dare to speak out in criticism of the government’s criminality, human rights violations and policies of indifference.
Amnesty International, in its damning report of the Ethiopian government, …
Indentured Servitude for Seniors
by Ellen Hodgson Brown / May 12th, 2012
The Social Security program…represents our commitment as a society to the belief that workers should not live in dread that a disability, death, or old age could leave them or their families destitute.
— President Jimmy Carter, December 20, 1977
[This law] assures the elderly that America will always keep the promises made in troubled times a half century ago…[The Social Security Amendments of 1983 are] a monument to the spirit of compassion and commitment that unites us as a people.
— President Ronald Reagan, April 20, 1983
So said Presidents Carter and Reagan, but that was before 1996, when Congress voted to allow federal agencies …
