Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

“This is an abduction, not an adoption.”

By Agence France-Presse

PORT-AU-PRINCE – Haitian police detained 10 members of a US Christian group after they allegedly tried to leave the country with more than 30 children who survived the country’s devastating earthquake.

News of the charges came as the UN’s food agency prepared to launch a massive food effort targeted at vulnerable women in a bid to ease some of the chaos surrounding the relief effort.

Police had arrested five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, as they tried to cross into the neighboring Dominican Republic with 33 children late Friday, Haitian authorities said.

Border police “saw a bus with a lot of children. Thirty-three children. When asked about the children’s documents, they had no documents,” Haitian Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said.

Members of Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge

The Americans were members of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children’s Refuge, said Social Affairs Minister Yves Christallin, adding: “This is an abduction, not an adoption.”

The leader of the group, identified as Laura Silsby, said the group’s aims were altruistic and that they were only seeking help for the children in the neighboring Dominican Republic, CNN reported.”We are trusting the truth will be revealed, and we are praying for that,” she said, adding that the matter was a misunderstanding over documentation.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

by Glenn Greenwald

British political news has been consumed for the last several weeks by a formal inquiry into the illegality and deceit behind Tony Blair’s decision to join the U.S. in invading Iraq.  Today, Blair himself is publicly testifying before the investigative commission and is being grilled about numerous false claims he made in the run-up to the war, not only about Iraqi weapons programs and their ties to Al Qaeda, but also about secret commitments he made to join the U.S. at a time when he and Bush were still pretending that they were undecided and awaiting the outcome of the U.N. negotiations and the inspection process.

A major focus of the investigation is the illegality of the war.  Some of the most embarrassing details that have emerged concerns the conclusions by Blair’s own legal advisers that the invasion of Iraq would be illegal without U.N. approval.  The top British legal officer had concluded that the war would be illegal, only to change his mind under substantial pressure shortly before the invasion.  Several weeks ago, a formal investigation in the Netherlands — whose government had supported the invasion — produced the first official adjudication of the legality of the war, and found it illegal, with “no basis in international law.”

As Digby notes, all of this stands in stark and shameful contrast to the U.S., which pointedly refuses to “look back” or concern itself with whether it waged an illegal (and horribly destructive) war.  The British inquiry has been widely criticized for being too passive and deferential and lacking any credible threat of accountability (other than disclosure of facts).  Still, one could hardly imagine George Bush and Dick Cheney being hauled before an investigative body and forced, under oath, to testify about what they did as a means of examining the illegality of that war.  Doing that would fundamentally conflict with two leading principles in American political life:  (1) our highest political leaders must never be accountable for actions they take while in power; and (2) whether something they do is “illegal” — especially the starting of wars — is utterly irrelevant.  Instead of formally investigating whether they broke the law, we treat them like elder statesmen who deserve a life of luxury and media reverence.  Tony Blair — who had no discernible expertise or experience in banking — himself is showered with riches for a “part-time” job by JP Morgan and by other institutions who benefited substantially from his acts in office.

All of this underscores the fact that — despite how much public debate it has received — we still childishly, and with moral blindness, refuse to come to terms with the true scope of our wrongdoing when it comes to the Iraq War.  Several hundred thousand Iraqis — at least — were killed as a result of this war, with another 4 million being turned into refugees.  As the Iraqi journalist and professor Ali Fadhil put it in 2008, on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion: “basically, my assessment is we have a whole nation called Iraq, now it’s wiped out.”  Contrary to conventional wisdom about the war, the alleged post-surge improvement in Iraqi civil society has not remotely mitigated the destruction spawned by the invasion.  As The Economist detailed in September, 2009, the U.S.-supported Maliki government is relying increasingly on Saddam-era tactics of torture, censorship, lawless sectarian militias, and brutal punishment of dissent: “Human-rights violations are becoming more common. In private many Iraqis, especially educated ones, are asking if their country may go back to being a police state.”

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Karl Frisch

Back in September, right-wing activist James O’Keefe told Fox News host Glenn Beck that he was “willing to serve prison time” for his work.

That just may happen.

According to an affidavit from the FBI, O’Keefe and three others were arrested on Monday in connection with an alleged plot to “interfer[e]” with the phone system in Sen. Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. O’Keefe is perhaps best known for the heavily edited and misleading undercover videos he and Hannah Giles shot of low-level ACORN employees while the right-wing duo were dressed as a pimp and prostitute, an escapade that itself may have violated state criminal statutes.

The New York Times reports that “the four men, two of whom were dressed as telephone repairmen, were charged with entering a federal property on false pretenses with the purpose of committing a felony. The crime charged is itself a felony that carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.”

As Media Matters‘ Eric Hananoki noted, O’Keefe’s three alleged accomplices — Joseph Basel, Robert Flanagan, and Stan Dai — are right-wing activists as well. Basel was the founder of a conservative campus publication at the University of Minnesota-Morris, which, like the campus publication started by O’Keefe at Rutgers University, received funding from the conservative Leadership Institute’s “Balance in Media” grant. Flanagan, the son of acting U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Louisiana William Flanagan, reportedly works at the conservative Pelican Institute in New Orleans, just half a block from Landrieu’s office. Dai received $5,000 from the right-wing Phillips Foundation’s Ronald Reagan Future Leaders Scholarship Program. Additionally, during his time as a campus conservative, Dai reportedly co-wrote “a satirical work entitled The Penis Monologues, apparently a takeoff on the Vagina Monologues.”

News of the four’s arrest spread quickly Tuesday.

Because Fox News had showered O’Keefe’s undercover video work targeting ACORN with near wall-to-wall coverage, one would have hoped the conservative network would provide comparable coverage of the arrest — it did not. In fact, a Media Matters study comparing coverage of the day following the release of O’Keefe and Giles’ first ACORN tape and the day news of O’Keefe’s arrest broke found that Fox News provided 13 times more coverage to the video.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

What kind of insane world have we been duped into by Wall Street? How can four guys in NY whose only reason to exist at all is playing games with paper, and making warped bets amongst themselves, about something they never even owned, threaten a real company with real people, who make a real product, for real reasons, and real value?

Maybe somebody need to explain to them that theirs is a warped non reality which has no justifiable reason to even exist. This is totally insane (just like the bet which they lost).  They need to figure out how to do something worthwhile with their miserable existences. What justifies the space they take up on this or any other planet? They are less than pond scum floating in the shallow end of the gene pool……fdv

American hedge fund managers are suing Porsche for more than $1 billion (£620 million).

Four fund managers – Elliott Associates, Glenhill Capital Management, Glenview Capital Management and Perry Capital – are accusing Porsche, its former chief executive and its former chief financial officer of repeatedly lying about their intention to take over Volkswagen.

The fund managers claim they lost more than $1 billion because they were shorting VW stock – a process of selling borrowed shares in the hope of buying them back more cheaply at a later date and pocketing the difference – in October 2008 when Porsche surprised the stock market by revealing a 75 per cent stake in VW.

Porsche’s announcement sent VW’s shares rocketing, and as the short sellers scrambled to buy back stock, that drove prices even higher.

The American funds lost more than $1 billion when forced to buy VW shares at the inflated price in order to meet their obligations to return the shares they had borrowed. Porsche profited from the squeeze by selling some of its secretly acquired stock.

Phil Beck, the funds’ attorney, said: “Porsche should be held accountable in a court of law. We’ll do whatever it takes to make sure that the rule of law is upheld.”

Reports also suggest that other VW investors may join the lawsuit, boosting claims to as much as $10 billion.

A Porsche spokesman said the company rejected the claim, adding that Porsche had “always abided by current capital markets law”.

Porsche has already investigated the behaviour of Wendelin Wiedeking, its former chief executive, and Holger Harter, its former vice-president of finance, and found no wrong-doing.

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Daniel Tencer

Anne Frank’s adolescent curiosity about sexuality is too much for a Virginia school district that has pulled the complete version of the young Jewish girl’s diary off its curriculum and off its shelves over a parent’s complaint about sexually explicit passages.

Culpeper County Public Schools has pulled Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition off the shelves because parents complained “over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition,” reports the Culpeper, Virginia, Star-Exponent.

The complaint has to do specifically with an expanded version of the diary published in 1995. Frank’s father, Otto, had excised large parts of his daughter’s diary prior to publication in the late 1940s. Anne was killed at the Auschwitz concentration camp in March, 1945. Her diary has made her arguably the most famous Holocaust victim.

According to Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post, the offending passage is a description of female genitalia:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

The decision to pull the book appears to have been made quickly, last November, on the basis of one complaint from a parent. The Star-Exponent reports:

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

by Abby Zimet

Picking up where “Catcher In the Rye” left off, a southern California school district has banned Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary after some poor, no-doubt-now-traumatized kid stumbled on the term “oral sex” – defined, aptly if clinically, as “oral stimulation of the genitals.” Menifee will now form a committee to plow through its 470,000-plus entries and decide if all dictionaries containing all sexual definitions should be banned. While they’re at it, we hope they check out the meanings of “repression,” “ignorance,” “fear,” and “open marketplace of ideas.” If they want to take a break from their virtuous labors, they could help out the homeless in a nearby town who just lost their only impromptu shelter, set up at a church where people seem to know the meanings of “compassion,” “priority,” and “give me a break.”

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today’s president

Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington
The Guardian

George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.

His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.

The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.

Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.

While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Important marketing strategy questions remain unanswered

The Supreme Court has decreed that corporations are persons and money is speech, so it was only a matter of time before a company decided to exercise its Constitutional right to run for Congress.

Following the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to allow unlimited corporate funding of federal campaigns, Murray Hill Inc. today announced it is filing to run for U.S. Congress. “Until now,” Murray Hill Inc. said in a statement, “corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington. But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” Murray Hill Inc. is believed to be the first “corporate person” to exercise its constitutional right to run for office.

“The strength of America,” Murray Hill Inc. said, “is in the boardrooms, country clubs and Lear jets of America’s great corporations. We’re saying to Wal-Mart, AIG and Pfizer, if not you, who? If not now, when?” Murray Hill Inc. added: “It’s our democracy. We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.” Murray Hill Inc., a diversifying corporation in the Washington, D.C. area, has long held an interest in politics and sees corporate candidacy as an “emerging new market.”

The announcement represents a landmark moment in American politics, as former President George W. Bush’s dream of an “ownership society” is finally realized. Still, important questions remain for the candidate. For instance:

• How will Murray Hill go about modernizing the nation’s antiquated system of “elections.” Surely there’s a more efficient way of generating broad consensus, and citizens shareholders will be looking to emerging politicorporate leaders to quickly craft best-of-breed solutions to maximize return and lower total cost of ownership going forward.
• Is it safe to assume that under-performing sectors of the country will be spun off or sold? (Specifically, it’s anticipated that Nebraska, New Jersey, South Carolina and Texas will come in for much-needed scrutiny.)

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and a leading faculty critic of BU president John Silber, died of a heart attack today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling, his family said. He was 87.

“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives,” Noam Chomsky, the left-wing activist and MIT professor, once wrote of Dr. Zinn. “When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”

For Dr. Zinn, activism was a natural extension of the revisionist brand of history he taught. Dr. Zinn’s best-known book, “A People’s History of the United States” (1980), had for its heroes not the Founding Fathers — many of them slaveholders and deeply attached to the status quo, as Dr. Zinn was quick to point out — but rather the farmers of Shays’ Rebellion and the union organizers of the 1930s.

As he wrote in his autobiography, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train” (1994), “From the start, my teaching was infused with my own history. I would try to be fair to other points of view, but I wanted more than ‘objectivity’; I wanted students to leave my classes not just better informed, but more prepared to relinquish the safety of silence, more prepared to speak up, to act against injustice wherever they saw it. This, of course, was a recipe for trouble.”

Certainly, it was a recipe for rancor between Dr. Zinn and Silber. Dr. Zinn twice helped lead faculty votes to oust the BU president, who in turn once accused Dr. Zinn of arson (a charge he quickly retracted) and cited him as a prime example of teachers “who poison the well of academe.”

Dr. Zinn was a cochairman of the strike committee when BU professors walked out in 1979. After the strike was settled, he and four colleagues were charged with violating their contract when they refused to cross a picket line of striking secretaries. The charges against “the BU Five” were soon dropped, however.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

As events this week have proven, SCOTUS is too highly venerated. Their latest outrage is the decree that ‘corporations are people’ and may spend as much money as they like in order to get their stooges into public office.

It is the worst decision since Bush v Gore which was, at the time, compared to Dred-Scott, a decision which in 1857, seven out of nine Supreme Court Justices declared that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Dred Scott had no rights whatsoever and could not sue in a Federal Court! The court ruled that he must remain a slave.

The court was wrong then. It was wrong again with Bush v Gore! The court is wrong now, dead wrong! Corporations are not people and should, by right, have no rights whatsoever and should, by right, exist as long as the people may find them useful or tolerable. Of late, their venal behavior and the wars of naked aggression that are fought on their behalf alone have become intolerable. It is time to reassess the status that is given both the Supreme Court and to the corporations. Perhaps both institutions should be not so gently reminded that ‘we the people’ are sovereign. ‘We the people’ are the boss’. ‘We the people’ have financed this farce with our moneys! ‘We the people’ demand a change NOW! Perhaps a real revolution will consider extensive reforms in the one case or abolition in another. Revolution now! Even Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes blew it when he failed to defend Eugene Debs’ rights of free speech. He compared Debs’ statements in opposition to US entry into WWI to ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre’. But if there really is a fire, yelling fire seems to me to be the prudent thing to do! Seems to me that the venerable Justice Holmes made a cute but glaringly invalid analogy! Seems to me that true patriots have not only a right but a moral responsibility to oppose their nation’s entry into foolhardly, vainglorious wars of naked aggression. It seems to me prudent that we demand an open, free and fair debate.

Otherwise, wars will continue to be fought by the poor for the benefit of the rich and the military-industrial complex which divides the spoils of war among Dick Cheney’s oil buddies and the other ‘paid thugs’ like Blackwater who hide behind the monicker –’defense contrctors’.

For eons wars have been fought for booty! That’s why the US fights them today. The booty du jour is oil! To deny one the right to oppose those wars –as Holmes denied Eugene Debs –is a recipe for military dictatorship.

St. Thomas More would have called the Military-Industrial complex and their shills on K-street a “conspiracy of rich men to procure their commodities in the name and title of the commonwealth!” [See: Thomas More, Utopia] This is why wars have been waged throughout the ages! If Holmes were alive, I will tell him that it is wrong NOT to yell fire in a crowded theater if the theater is, indeed, on fire! At this moment in our history, the American republic is threatened, and among those threatening it is the US Supreme Court itself!

I am yelling FIRE, FIRE, FIRE!

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Paul Krugman

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers, liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, “I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Pentagon Time
Tick…Tick…Tick…

By Tom Engelhardt

Back in 2007, when General David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery.  In an interview in April of that year, he typically said:  “I’m conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, so we’re obviously trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit and to produce some progress on the ground that can perhaps give hope to those in the coalition countries, in Washington, and perhaps put a little more time on the Washington clock.”  And he wasn’t alone.  Military spokespeople and others in the Bush administration right up to the president regularly seemed to hear one, two, or sometimes as many as three clocks ticking away ominously and out of sync.

Hearing some discordant ticking myself of late, I decided to retrieve Petraeus’s image from the dustbin of history.  So imagine three ticking clocks, all right here in the U.S., one set to Washington time, a second to American time, and the third to Pentagon time.

In Washington — with even the New York Times now agreeing that a “majority” of 100 is 60 (not 51) and that the Senate’s 41st vote settles everything — the clock seems to be ticking erratically, if at all.  On the other hand, that American clock, if we’re to believe the good citizens of Massachusetts, is ticking away like a bomb.  Americans are impatient, angry, and “in revolt” against Washington time. That’s what the media continue to tell us in the wake of last week’s Senate upset.

Depending on which account you read, they were outraged by a nearly trillion dollar health-care reform that was also a giveaway to insurance companies, and annoyed by Democratic candidate Martha Coakley calling Curt Schilling a “Yankees fan” as well as besmirching handshaking in the cold outside Fenway Park; they were anxious about an official Massachusetts unemployment rate of 9.4% (and a higher real one), an economy that has rebounded for bankers but not for regular people, soaring deficits, staggering foreclosure rates, mega-banking bonuses, the Obama administration’s bailout of those same bankers, and its coziness with Wall Street.  They were angry and impatient about a lot of things, blind angry you might say, since they were ready to vote back into office the party not in office, even if behind that party’s “new face” were ideas that would take us back to the origins of the present disaster.

A Blank Check for the Pentagon

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Chilcot and the courts won’t do it, so it is up to us to show that we won’t let an illegal act of mass murder go unpunished

George Monbiot
guardian.co.uk

The only question that counts is the one that the Chilcot inquiry won’t address: was the war with Iraq illegal? If the answer is yes, everything changes. The war is no longer a political matter, but a criminal one, and those who commissioned it should be committed for trial for what the Nuremberg tribunal called “the supreme international crime”: the crime of aggression.

But there’s a problem with official inquiries in the United Kingdom: the government appoints their members and sets their terms of reference. It’s the equivalent of a criminal suspect being allowed to choose what the charges should be, who should judge his case and who should sit on the jury. As a senior judge told the Guardian in November: “Looking into the legality of the war is the last thing the government wants. And actually, it’s the last thing the opposition wants either because they voted for the war. There simply is not the political pressure to explore the question of legality – they have not asked because they don’t want the answer.”

Others have explored it, however. Two weeks ago a Dutch inquiry, led by a former supreme court judge, found that the invasion had “no sound mandate in international law”. Last month Lord Steyn, a former law lord, said that “in the absence of a second UN resolution authorising invasion, it was illegal“. In November Lord Bingham, the former lord chief justice, stated that, without the blessing of the UN, the Iraq war was “a serious violation of international law and the rule of law“.

Under the United Nations charter, two conditions must be met before a war can legally be waged. The parties to a dispute must first “seek a solution by negotiation” (article 33). They can take up arms without an explicit mandate from the UN security council only “if an armed attack occurs against [them]” (article 51). Neither of these conditions applied. The US and UK governments rejected Iraq’s attempts to negotiate. At one point the US state department even announced that it would “go into thwart mode” to prevent the Iraqis from resuming talks on weapons inspection (all references are on my website). Iraq had launched no armed attack against either nation.

We also know that the UK government was aware that the war it intended to launch was illegal. In March 2002, the Cabinet Office explained that “a legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers’ advice, none currently exists.” In July 2002, Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, told the prime minister that there were only “three possible legal bases” for launching a war – “self-defence, ­humanitarian intervention, or UNSC [security council] authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case.” Bush and Blair later failed to obtain security council authorisation.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

He had not picked her up since she was a toddler. Last week he carried her home

Fabienne Cherisma’s body is carried home by her father, who believes she was shot three times by police.

Rory Carroll in Port-au-Prince
guardian.co.uk

Fabienne Cherisma spent her life assessing margins. She was just 15 but had a knack for knowing what would sell on the ­family’s knick-knack stall, and for how much. In Port-au-Prince’s raucous, ­hardscrabble market it was a gift that helped keep her parents and five siblings on the right side of the survival line.

“My daughter was a sales lady. A good one,” said her father, Osam. “Whatever she bought she was always able to sell it on for a bit more.” A few cents extra profit meant an extra spoon of rice for dinner in the family’s one-room shack.

His daughter spent mornings in stores and other markets hunting bargains – pots, soap, combs, zips, bras – and then hawked them with a mark-up from the family’s patch of concrete near Grand Rue, an open-air market where traders shout over the throb of generators and flies hover over steaming garbage.

Fabienne spent her afternoons at school, excelling at maths, French and science. “She was very intelligent,” Osam said. “Her head was full of knowledge.” Despite her nose for commerce her ­ambition was to become a nurse.

Haiti’s 12 January earthquake changed Fabienne’s usual calculations. The family home escaped unscathed, and within days the market resumed, but mobs were ­looting nearby stores. Human ant-trails carrying food, electrical goods and ­furniture passed her stall.

Amid the devastation, Fabienne spotted an opportunity, and last Tuesday she joined the throng. Most looters were male but the girl in the pink mini-skirt emerged from the melee with two plastic chairs and three framed pictures.

She was scrambling back over collapsed rooftops, just a few streets from her stall, when police in fluorescent yellow vests began shooting in the air. A bullet to the head felled Fabienne. She collapsed on to one of the paintings, blood trickling from the wound.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Rush Limbaugh

I know there are a lot of people out there who are upset about some of the things I’ve been saying on my radio program lately. My comments about the situation in Haiti have hurt and angered many Americans who genuinely care about the plight of the Haitian people, and that hurt and anger will likely never go away. Many of you are probably wondering, “What would compel a human being to say things like that?” Well, here’s your answer: I am a very bad person. And, to tell you the truth, I don’t really want to be alive anymore.

Try to look at it from my point of view. I have no reason to live. In my 59 years, I’ve made millions of dollars, built a veritable media empire, and accomplished virtually everything that a man of my limited imagination and worldview could possibly accomplish. And yet, at this point, in no way could you refer to what I’m doing as “living,” exactly. I just sort of exist. I derive no real pleasure from life. Oh, sure, I talk a big game about what a golf nut I am and how much I enjoy the taste of a fine cigar, but it’s all horseshit. Complete and utter horseshit.

I don’t enjoy that stuff. I don’t enjoy anything. I don’t even want to be here. The sadness and regret I feel every waking hour of my life is absolutely unbearable. I am a miserable pig and I do not want to exist.

The irony is that, even if I did die, the hell I would surely be sent to could not possibly be any worse than the bottomless pool of excrement I already paddle around in like some demented, shit-covered walrus. In fact, every time I hear my voice coming through the headphones I nearly gag, and I think, “What the fuck am I doing?” Why would I say that Michael J. Fox is faking his Parkinson’s symptoms? Why would I find it funny to play a song called “Barack the Magic Negro”? Why would I tell people not to give aid to Haiti?

What the fuck is wrong with me?

I live in constant terror and that terror informs my every word, thought, and action.

See, the thing is, I honestly cannot control the bilious hatred and filth that oozes out of my mouth. I want to—believe me, I want to—but I can’t. And every time I speak, a tiny voice inside my head is screaming, “Stop talking, you stupid, insensitive prick. JUST STOP FUCKING TALKING. All you do is spread hate and fear, and the world would be a better place without you, you worthless, amoral, cocksucking fuckface.“

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Chris Hedges

Corporate forces, long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, carried out a coup d’état in slow motion. The coup is over. We lost. The ruling is one more judicial effort to streamline mechanisms for corporate control. It exposes the myth of a functioning democracy and the triumph of corporate power. But it does not significantly alter the political landscape. The corporate state is firmly cemented in place.

The fiction of democracy remains useful, not only for corporations, but for our bankrupt liberal class. If the fiction is seriously challenged, liberals will be forced to consider actual resistance, which will be neither pleasant nor easy. As long as a democratic facade exists, liberals can engage in an empty moral posturing that requires little sacrifice or commitment. They can be the self-appointed scolds of the Democratic Party, acting as if they are part of the debate and feel vindicated by their cries of protest.

Much of the outrage expressed about the court’s ruling is the outrage of those who prefer this choreographed charade. As long as the charade is played, they do not have to consider how to combat what the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls our system of “inverted totalitarianism.”

Inverted totalitarianism represents “the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry,” Wolin writes in “Democracy Incorporated.” Inverted totalitarianism differs from classical forms of totalitarianism, which revolve around a demagogue or charismatic leader, and finds its expression in the anonymity of the corporate state. The corporate forces behind inverted totalitarianism do not, as classical totalitarian movements do, boast of replacing decaying structures with a new, revolutionary structure. They purport to honor electoral politics, freedom and the Constitution. But they so corrupt and manipulate the levers of power as to make democracy impossible.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

Justin Elliott

Former Kansas Attorney General Phill Kline

In a new ethics complaint that alleges large-scale abuse of office, the former attorney general of Kansas is accused of dispatching staff to record license plates of women entering George Tiller’s abortion clinic, getting records from a motel where patients stayed, and obtaining state medical files under false pretenses, then retaining them after his term as AG was over and repeatedly lying about it in court.

All of this occurred during Attorney General Phill Kline’s unsuccessful pursuit of Tiller, the doctor who ran Women’s Health Care Services of Wichita and was shot to death, allegedly by an anti-abortion extremist, in 2009.

Kline is also accused of violating professional standards by appearing on the O’Reilly Factor five days before the 2006 election to talk about his pursuit of Tiller, flouting a warning from the state Supreme Court not to publicize legal positions. He was up for reelection as AG at the time.

Kline, who has forged his career as a single-minded opponent of abortion — he was named Man of the Year in 2006 by anti-abortion group Operation Rescue — now teaches law at Liberty University in Virginia. He faces a hearing in May before a state board for the discipline of attorneys, and he could lose his law license, a spokesman for the disciplinary administrator tells TPMmuckraker.

The ethics complaint, filed Tuesday, is the product of an investigation by the disciplinary administrator, who reports to the state Supreme Court, according to the Kansas City Star. The probe was prompted by complaints from Tiller’s lawyer and the forewoman of a grand jury called to investigate Planned Parenthood. Kline’s attorney has promised a “full-blooded response.”

Kline’s pursuit of Tiller and Planned Parenthood of Kansas began almost immediately when Kline took office as AG in 2003 and continued for years.

Here’s what the ethics complaint alleges:

Shortly after taking office, Kline met in April 2003 with top deputies to discuss how best to target Tiller and his clinic. A plan was laid out to access confidential medical files held by the state department of health and social services agency.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

NEW YORK (Reuters) – U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve’s bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

Crisis in Credit

The request to keep the details secret were made by the New York Federal Reserve — a regulator that helped orchestrate the bailout — and by the giant insurer itself, according to the emails.

The emails from early last year reveal that officials at the New York Fed were only comfortable with AIG submitting a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after getting assurances from the regulatory agency that “special security procedures” would be used to handle the document.

The SEC, according to an email sent by a New York Fed lawyer on January 13, 2009, agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG’s confidentiality request.

The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored “in a special area where national security related files are kept,” the lawyer wrote.

In another email, a New York Fed official said the SEC suggested in late December 2008, that AIG file the document under seal and then apply to the regulatory agency for so-called confidential treatment, if central bankers wanted to stop the information from becoming public.

The emails were included in the mountain of documents the New York Fed turned over last week to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which will hold a hearing Wednesday into the AIG bailout and the New York Fed’s role in trying keep the specific terms of that Fed-engineered rescue in November 2008, from being made public.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post

By Daniel Martin

Medical records which would shed light on the death of government scientist David Kelly will be kept secret for 70 years, it emerged yesterday.

The unprecedented move has been ordered by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry which controversially concluded that the mysterious death was suicide.

It means vital evidence, including the results of Dr Kelly’s post-mortem examination  -  which have never been made public  -  will remain under wraps until 2073, by which time anyone involved in the case will almost certainly be dead.

The body of 59-year- old UN weapons inspector Dr Kelly was found in July 2003 in woods near his Oxfordshire home. Days earlier he had been revealed as the source of a BBC story claiming evidence against Iraq had been ’sexed up’ to justify invasion.

No coroner’s inquest has been held into the death.

Last night, Dr Michael Powers QC, a doctor campaigning to overturn Lord Hutton’s findings, told the Daily Mail: ‘I cannot understand why this extraordinary move has been taken.

(Read the article)

Comments(0) |  Print This Post