By Chris Hedges, Truthdig, 14 September 2009

The right-wing accusations against Barack Obama are true. He is a socialist, although he practices socialism for corporations. He is squandering the country’s future with deficits that can never be repaid. He has retained and even bolstered our surveillance state to spy on Americans. He is forcing us to buy into a health care system that will enrich corporations and expand the abuse of our for-profit medical care. He will not stanch unemployment. He will not end our wars. He will not rebuild the nation. He is a tool of the corporate state.

The right wing is not wrong. It is not the problem. We are the problem. If we do not tap into the justifiable anger sweeping across the nation, if we do not militantly push back against corporate fraud and imperial wars that we cannot win or afford, the political vacuum we have created will be filled with right-wing lunatics and proto-fascists. The goons will inherit power not because they are astute, but because we are weak and inept.

[Read the article | h/t]

By Eva Golinger. Translated from Spanish into English for Axis of Logic by Iris Buehler and revised by Les Blough
10 September 2009

In the midst of an international campaign launched against President Chávez, carried out by the extreme Right from Colombia and supported by Washington, the US State Department has organized and financed the trip of eight young Venezuelan politicians to the USA in order to denounce the Venezuelan government and to strengthen the links between young US Republicans and the Venezuelan Right. The eight young Venezuelan men and women have been selected by the US State Department as part of the program “Democracy for young political leaders”. It is a project of the interchange program “International Visitor Leaders – Venezuela”, which is being used by the Washington administration to recruit and train political actors who would later on promote the North American agenda in Venezuela.

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Kim Phillips-Fein, BookForum, Sept/Oct/Nov 2009

The world’s largest jail is the Twin Towers Correctional Facility of Los Angeles, which occupies two peach-colored structures in the center of the city. Within those walls are two gymnasiums, kitchens capable of serving seventeen thousand meals a day, medical and mental-health wards, and, of course, the inmates’ quarters—which are straight out of Michel Foucault’s darker imaginings, heptagons with a single security guard in the middle surveying ninety-six cells at once through glass doors and with video cameras. Five stories high, the jail connects its floors via an enclosed yard area with a basketball hoop; a small wire cage provides a recreational area for those prisoners who need to be kept apart from the rest. Telephone banks allow for what one nurse calls an “umbilical cord to the outside world.”

Once upon a time, jails might have been rotting, decrepit pits, but the Twin Towers are gleaming and new. As one inmate put it, they are the Hilton of correctional facilities. For UC Berkeley sociologist Loïc Wacquant, this only makes them all the more sinister and powerful. They are not a world apart—on the contrary, they represent an integral piece of American society, attracting major public investment even in an antigovernment age.

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Ben Dangl’s ZSpace Page / ZSpace

Richard Gillman, the former CEO of Chicago’s Republic Windows and Doors factory where over 200 workers organized a victorious sit-in last year, has been sent to jail on eight charges including felony, theft, fraud, and money laundering. After the judge announced the $10 million bail, the shocked and dazed Gillman, dressed in a pin-striped suit, was hauled away to the county jail.

Republic workers captured the attention of the world when they occupied their plant on December 5, 2008 calling for the severance and vacation pay they were due. The sit-in ended six days later when the Bank of America and other lenders to Republic agreed to pay the workers the approximately $2 million owed to them. Recently, the workers won another victory with the arrest of Gillman.

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If Only the Government Had Respected Its Own Laws…
I Am Barack Obama’s Political Prisoner Now
By LEONARD PELTIER

The United States Department of Justice has once again made a mockery of its lofty and pretentious title.

After releasing an original and continuing disciple of death cult leader Charles Manson (sic – Lynette Squeaky Fromme) who attempted to shoot President Gerald Ford, an admitted Croatian terrorist, and another attempted assassin of President Ford under the mandatory 30-year parole law, the U.S. Parole Commission deemed that my release would “promote disrespect for the law.”

If only the federal government would have respected its own laws, not to mention the treaties that are, under the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the land, I would never have been convicted nor forced to spend more than half my life in captivity. Not to mention the fact that every law in this country was created without the consent of Native peoples and is applied unequally at our expense. If nothing else, my experience should raise serious questions about the FBI’s supposed jurisdiction in Indian Country.

[Read the statement]