Monday Youtube Post

Chomsky to RT: Bush tortured people, but Obama just kills them

He also talks about OccupyWallStreet, the Arab Spring, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here's a mindblowing speech by a Bahraini activist named Ahlam Al-Khezaei

The people of Bahrain have been fighting in the streets since February. This week, 20 doctors and medics were jailed for sentences ranging between 5 and 15 years, for treating injured protesters. The United States considers Bahrain an important ally, and continues to sell them weapons.

Lawrence O'Donnell covers the widespread police brutality on Wall Street over the weekend

“This weekend a few troublemakers turned a peaceful protest against Wall Street greed into a violent burst of chaos. The troublemakers carried pepper spray, and guns, and were wearing badges.”

NYPD wall in and mace a peaceful group of women at OccupyWallStreet for no god damn reason

I'm sure most people have seen this by now, but I ran across the blog of one of the women who was maced in that video.

...Upon arriving at Union Square, the police presence erupted. Our group stopped to regroup at the park, which unfortunately gave them time to surround the area and increase their force. We saw the nets coming out and they blocked off the streets; the march started to fray and split into different directions. We tried to turn around and march back to Wall Street, but we were not allowed.

The majority who were moving back to Wall Street headed down 12th Street. When we were between University and 5th Avenue, the [police] began blocking off the street. I was walking on the sidewalk in a clump with one of my friends and a few other women. Two female police officers blocked our path. We asked them repeatedly why we couldn’t walk down the sidewalk; they refused to talk to us. The one time they spoke was when one officer repeatedly said between her teeth, “do not get in my face. Get out of my face. GET OUT OF MY FACE.” The police force was increasing and blocking off the street from both ends, and not allowing people to cross the road. I was filming the scene with my DSLR.

I looked over, and in a second I saw the officer spraying something into the crowd. I recognized the mace immediately and shut my eyes; though I did deflect some of it, I was not completely successful. The burning set in immediately, and I heard the screaming. I started crying. A few women around me were lying on the ground holding their faces and wailing. My friend grabbed onto me.

Here's where the video comes in. The woman writing this is the redhead with the ponytail. She's 18.

I dropped my camera, but it kept filming. I was hysterical. I grabbed the woman closest to me, who got hit the hardest... She was absolutely hysterical, she couldn’t see. People were running out of local restaurants and bringing us water. The police promised there would be a medic; it never arrived. Some of the other people in the march had seen what happened and half-carried us across the street to get some milk and vinegar for our faces.

Here's the footage from her own camera:

During this time, the police were pushing their net up the street towards 5th Ave, and everyone on the sidewalk was being boxed in for arrest. They forced us to move, even though we were visibly suffering. As I was being pushed up the street, another protestor was pouring a milk solution on my face to ease the burning. They forced us all against the wall, and we knew we would be arrested. Everyone asked why; no police officer would respond. I was freaking out. One white-collar officer walked down the line and screamed, “YOU’RE ALL GETTING LOCKED UP!”. Some of the people on the block had not even been involved. Some were getting pushed or dragged under the nets by police so that they would be part of the mass arrest. Others in the area were tackled, beaten, dragged, or tazed by the officers. They put us all in plastic cuffs and placed us in lines...

Eventually, they brought in the loads of police vans to bring us to the station. They even utilized one MTA bus to put us on, because there were so many. They walked me to the van, and I waited several minutes to get inside as they prepared it...

They drove us to the station, precinct 1. We were forced to wait outside the station, in the vehicles, for almost 2 hours. The police were walking around outside, waiting, talking to each other. About 15-20 minutes in, one officer assured us that we would be moved in a few minutes and we would be processed and out in an hour or two. No one knew what was going on. It was during this time that I severely needed to use the bathroom. For an hour and a half, I asked over and over if I could get an escort to go. It got to the point where I was in so much physical pain that I was crying. I pleaded the cops over and over. Everyone else in the car tried to get their attention. They ignored us. They turned the music up. They told me to wait. It wasn’t until I cried so much that they were forced to face me, that somebody finally found me an escort. They didn’t remove my cuffs. She pulled my pants down for me and watched me. When we were exiting, she said that she didn’t like doing this, she had four kids and she didn’t think this was right. She agreed with our sentiment, but she didn’t understand why we had to be violent. I told her we were peaceful, and that I had been maced and arrested while walking on the sidewalk. She was silent. I looked at every officer who had let me through to use the bathroom and said thank you. They were silent.

I was finally put into the holding cell, where I was reunited with my friend and met with a bunch of the other women involved. Soon after, we were each placed in our own cells: 5 women per 1 person room. I was detained there for between 5 and 6 hours. Some demanded their one phone call, only to be told that they could only make calls within the five boroughs. We sat and waited to be processed.

I was finally released at 1:30 am. I have a court date on November 3rd at 9:30 am. I’m being charged with blocking vehicle traffic and unlawful conduct.

Anonymous has allegedly identified the cop who sprayed the women, and has released all his personal information to the public. I have no feelings about this.

As we watched your officers kettle innocent women, we observed you barbarically pepper spray wildly into the group of kettled women. We were shocked and disgusted by your behavior. You know who the innocent women were, now they will have the chance to know who you are. Before you commit atrocities against innocent people, think twice. WE ARE WATCHING!!! Expect Us!

This is directly unrelated to the attack, but protester named Terri Lee recently emailed Noam Chomsky asking for his thoughts about the OccupyWallStreet, and he actually responded back. He called them "courageous" and "honorable," and I don't think he could've possibly chosen better words.

Anyone with eyes open knows that the gangsterism of Wall Street — financial institutions generally — has caused severe damage to the people of the United States (and the world). And should also know that it has been doing so increasingly for over 30 years, as their power in the economy has radically increased, and with it their political power. That has set in motion a vicious cycle that has concentrated immense wealth, and with it political power, in a tiny sector of the population, a fraction of 1%, while the rest increasingly become what is sometimes called “a precariat” — seeking to survive in a precarious existence. They also carry out these ugly activities with almost complete impunity — not only too big to fail, but also “too big to jail.”

The courageous and honorable protests underway in Wall Street should serve to bring this calamity to public attention, and to lead to dedicated efforts to overcome it and set the society on a more healthy course.

It's really clever the way the police did this. They only struck when they were able to divert a small group of protesters away from everyone else, and close them off. They never intended for this to end peacefully. The women weren't allowed to leave, and the cops wouldn't answer their questions. Outnumbered, the group was then maced and tazed and beaten. This was a message. At this point, the protesters only have two options: watch fascists beat the shit out of women, or fight back. It's that simple.

Sunday Youtube Post

Crowd of Republicans boo an active duty soldier on national television for being gay

I can't fucking believe this happened. I watched this live and it made me sick to my stomach.



Here's a transcript I mostly nabbed from ThinkProgress in case you're at a place where you can't watch videos. You really need to watch it though.

Steven Hill: In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq I had to lie about who I was because I'm a gay soldier, and I didn't want to lose my job. My question is, under one of your presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that has been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?

[Audience boos him]

SANTORUM: Yeah, I would say any type of sexual activity has absolutely no place in the military, and the fact that they’re making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we’re going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege and removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I think tries to inject social policy into the military and the military’s job is to do one thing — and that is to defend our country. We need to give the military, which is all volunteer, the ability to do so…and I believe this undermines that ability.

KELLY: So what would you do with soliders like Steven Hill. Now he’s out…so what would you do as president?

SANTORUM: Look, what we’re doing is playing social experimentation with our military right now and that’s tragic. I would just say that going forward, we would reinstitute that policy if Rick Santorum was president. Period. That policy would be reinstituted and as far as people in, I would not throw them out because that would be unfair to them because of the policy of this administration, but we would move forward in conformity to what was happening in the past, which is — sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone. Keep it to yourself — whether your’re heterosexual or homosexual.

There are a few problems with this.

1. He says that gay people are "making a point to include it [sexual activity] as a provision within the military..." If you think sexual promiscuity is a requirement for being gay, then you're a god damn idiot.
2. Sexual activity in the military is not the issue being debated. Nobody is arguing that sexual activity among our soldiers should be encouraged or tolerated. The issue is soldiers being kicked out of the military because they're gay, and their colleagues using it as a tool for blackmail. That's the issue here, not your gay rape fears.
3. This is not an "experiment." We know full well what happens when a military has gay people in it--nothing. You can ask Canada, Germany, England, France, Italy, Israel (Israel, for god's sake), Japan, Australia, and basically every country on that planet that's not a totalitarian regime.
4. "Sex is not an issue. It should not be an issue. Leave it alone." Right, we know. Except, people like myself take this attitude to mean that gay people can serve in the military.

There is no excuse for this. Nor is there a precedent in American history, I don't think. A week or two ago, Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul "Are you saying society should just let [someone without health insurance] die?" and audience members enthusiastically shouted "Yeah!"

The Republican party is powered by reactionary hate. These debates are not about coming up with solutions. They're about overhyping what little progress has been made in the last couple years, and foaming at the mouth trying to derail it. This is a cult.

GOProud, a group of gay Republicans (really) issued a statement, and said it better than I could:

Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology.

That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done – put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life. It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.

Stephen Hill is serving our country in Iraq, fighting a war Senator Santorum says he supports. How can Senator Santorum claim to support this war if he doesn’t support the brave men and women who are fighting it?

A leftist defense of Ron Paul

I'm a little surprised I didn't write this.

I'll take the reactionary over the murderer, thanks by Charles Davis

Ron Paul is far from perfect, but I'll say this much for the Texas congressman: He has never authorized a drone strike in Pakistan. He has never authorized the killing of dozens of women and children in Yemen. He hasn't protected torturers from prosecution and he hasn't overseen the torturous treatment of a 23-year-old young man for the “crime” of revealing the government's criminal behavior.

Can the same be said for Barack Obama?

Yet, ask a good movement liberal or progressive about the two and you'll quickly be informed that yeah, Ron Paul's good on the war stuff -- yawn -- but otherwise he's a no-good right-wing reactionary of the worst order, a guy who'd kick your Aunt Beth off Medicare and force her to turn tricks for blood-pressure meds. By contrast, Obama, war crimes and all, provokes no such visceral distaste. He's more cosmopolitan, after all; less Texas-y. He's a Democrat. And gosh, even if he's made a few mistakes, he means well.

Sure he's a murderer, in other words, but at least he's not a Republican!

Put another, even less charitable way: Democratic partisans – liberals – are willing to trade the lives of a couple thousand poor Pakistani tribesman in exchange for a few liberal catnip-filled speeches and NPR tote bags for the underprivileged. The number of party-line progressives who would vote for Ron Paul over Barack Obama wouldn't be enough to fill Conference Room B at the local Sheraton, with even harshest left-leaning critics of the president, like Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, saying they'd prefer the mass-murdering sociopath to that kooky Constitution fetishist.

As someone who sees the electoral process as primarily a distraction, something that diverts energy and attention from more effective means of reforming the system, I don't much care if people don't vote for Ron Paul. In fact, if you're going to vote, I'd rather you cast a write-in ballot for Emma Goldman. But! I do have a problem with those who imagine themselves to be liberal-minded citizens of the world casting their vote for Barack Obama and propagating the notion that someone can bomb and/or militarily occupy Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya and still earn more Progressive Points than the guy who would, you know, not do any of that.

Let's just assume the worst about Paul: that he's a corporate libertarian in the Reason magazine/Cato Institute mold that would grant Big Business and the financial industry license to do whatever the hell it wants with little in the way of accountability (I call this scenario the “status quo”). Let's say he dines on Labradoodle puppies while using their blood to scribble notes in the margins of his dog-eared, gold-encrusted copy of Atlas Shrugged.

So. Fucking. What.

Barack Obama isn't exactly Eugene Debs, after all. Hell, he's not even Jimmy Carter. The facts are: he's pushed for the largest military budget in world history, given trillions of dollars to Wall Street in bailouts and near-zero interest loans from the Federal Reserve, protected oil companies like BP from legal liability for environmental damages they cause – from poisoning the Gulf to climate change – and mandated that all Americans purchase the U.S. health insurance industry's product. You might argue Paul's a corporatist, but there's no denying Obama's one.

And at least Paul would – and this is important, I think – stop killing poor foreigners with cluster bombs and Predator drones. Unlike the Nobel Peace Prize winner-in-chief, Paul would also bring the troops home from not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Europe, Korea and Okinawa. There'd be no need for a School of the Americas because the U.S. wouldn't be busy training foreign military personnel the finer points of human rights abuses. Israel would have to carry out its war crimes on its own dime.

Even on on the most pressing domestic issues of the day, Paul strikes me as a hell of a lot more progressive than Obama. Look at the war on drugs: Obama has continued the same failed prohibitionist policies as his predecessors, maintaining a status quo that has placed 2.3 million – or one in 100 – Americans behind bars, the vast majority African-American and Hispanic. Paul, on the other hand, has called for ending the drug war and said he would pardon non-violent offenders, which would be the single greatest reform a president could make in the domestic sphere, equivalent in magnitude to ending Jim Crow.

Paul would also stop providing subsidies to corporate agriculture, nuclear energy and fossil fuels, while allowing class-action tort suits to proceed against oil and coal companies for the environmental damage they have wrought. Obama, by contrast, is providing billions to coal companies under the guise of “clean energy” – see his administration's policies on carbon capture and sequestration, the fossil fuel-equivalent of missile defense – and promising billions more so mega-energy corporations can get started on that “nuclear renaissance” we've all heard so much about. And if Paul really did succeed in cutting all those federal departments he talks about, there's nothing to prevent states and local governments -- and, I would hope, alternative social organizations not dependent on coercion -- from addressing issues such as health care and education. Decentralism isn't a bad thing.

All that aside, though, it seems to me that if you're going to style yourself a progressive, liberal humanitarian, your first priority really ought to be stopping your government from killing poor people. Second on that list? Stopping your government from putting hundreds of thousands of your fellow citizens in cages for decades at a time over non-violent “crimes” committed by consenting adults. Seriously: what the fuck? Social Security's great and all I guess, but not exploding little children with cluster bombs – shouldn't that be at the top of the Liberal Agenda?

Over half of Americans' income taxes go to the military-industrial complex and the costs of arresting and locking up their fellow citizens. On both counts, Ron Paul's policy positions are far more progressive than those held – and indeed, implemented – by Barack Obama. And yet it's Paul who's the reactionary of the two?

My sweeping, I'm hoping overly broad assessment: liberals, especially the pundit class, don't much care about dead foreigners. They're a political problem at best – will the Afghan war derail Obama's re-election campaign? – not a moral one. And liberals are more than willing to accept a few charred women and children in some country they'll never visit in exchange for increasing social welfare spending by 0.02 percent, or at least not cutting it by as much as a mean 'ol Rethuglican.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum, for example, has chastised anti-Obama lefties, complaining that undermining – by way of accurately assessing and commenting upon – a warmonger of the Democratic persuasion is “extraordinarily self-destructive" to all FDR-fearing lefties.

“Just ask LBJ,” Drum added. The historical footnote he left out: That LBJ was run out of office by the anti-war left because the guy was murdering hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. But mass murder is no reason to oppose a Democratic president, at least not if you're a professional liberal.

There are exceptions: Just Foreign Policy's Robert Naiman has a piece in Truth Out suggesting the anti-war left checking out Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico who's something of a Ron Paul-lite. But for too many liberals, it seems partisanship and the promise – not even necessarily the delivery, if you've been reading Obama's die-hard apologists – of infinitesimally more spending on domestic programs is more important than saving the lives of a few thousand innocent women and children who happen to live outside the confines of the arbitrary geopolitical entity known as the United States.

Another reason to root -- if not vote -- for Ron Paul: if there was a Republican in the White House, liberals just might start caring about the murder of non-Americans again.