International Community, U.N. Remain Silent On Ethnic Cleansing Of Muslims by Buddists In Myanmar

Oldspeak: ” Minority Rohingya population is being beaten, raped and killed by security forces and Rakhine Buddhists. They [international organizations and UN] have never broken their silence or provided a single piece of information about what is going on there… this is a very clear sign that this work is the work of those the powerful that might is right; if you are mighty you give yourself the right to raise the issues that you want and you do not talk about the issues that do not boil down to your interests,” -Ibrahim Mousawi While corporate media work faithfully to play up the civil war in Syria to provide pretext for invasion and regime change, Muslims are being murdered by the scores in Myanmar. All while U.S. and it’s western allies continue strengthen military ties and Wall St and the IMF invest in this murderous and tyrannical regime.  The politics of naming is always whimsical…

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Ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Burma by Buddhists

By UK Guardian/AP:

Communal violence is continuing in western Burma six weeks after the government declared a state of emergency, with much of it directed at minority Muslim Rohingyas who have been beaten, raped and killed, Amnesty International has claimed.

The rights group accused both security forces and ethnic Rakhine Buddhists of carrying out fresh attacks against Rohingyas, who are regarded as foreigners by the ethnic majority and denied citizenship by the government because it considers them illegal settlers from neighbouring Bangladesh.

After a series of isolated killings starting in late May, bloody skirmishes spread quickly across much of Burma’s coastal Rakhine state.

The government declared a state of emergency on 10 June, deploying troops to quell the unrest and protect both mosques and monasteries. Authorities said at least 78 people had been killed and thousands of homes of both Buddhists and Muslims either burned down or destroyed.

Since then, communal violence has continued, albeit at reduced intensity. Amnesty said attacks were now being directed mostly at the Rohingya population.

Violence in the past six weeks has been “primarily one-sided, with Muslims generally and Rohingyas specifically the targets and victims”, Benjamin Zawacki, a Bangkok-based researcher for Amnesty, told the Associated Press. “Some of this is by the security forces’ own hands, some by Rakhine Buddhists, with the security forces turning a blind eye in some cases.”

Officials from Burma’s government could not immediately be reached for comment.

Amnesty also said security forces, including the police and the army, had detained hundreds of Rohingyas.

“While the restoration of order, security, and the protection of human rights is necessary, most arrests appear to have been arbitrary and discriminatory, violating the rights to liberty and to freedom from discrimination on grounds of religion,” Amnesty said in a statement.

The violence, which reached its bloodiest point in June, constituted some of the country’s deadliest sectarian bloodshed in years and raised international concerns about the fate of the Rohingyas inside Burma.

The Burmese president, Thein Sein, said earlier this month the solution to ethnic enmity in Rakhine state was to either send the Rohingyas to a third country or have the United Nations refugee agency look after them. The UNHCR chief, Antonio Guterres, said, however, it was not his agency’s job to resettle the Rohingyas.

Many people in Burma do not recognise Rohingyas as legitimate settlers – even those of Bengali heritage who came in the 19th century when the country was under British rule. The exodus of Rohingyas to Bangladesh in the 1980s and 1990s because of persecution, and their subsequent return, has added to the confusion over who among them are illegal immigrants.

Bangladesh also denies the Rohingyas citizenship, arguing that they have been living in Burma for centuries and should be recognised as citizens there instead.

The UN estimates that 800,000 Rohingyas live in Burma. Thousands attempt to flee every year to Bangladesh, Malaysia and elsewhere, trying to escape a life of abuse that rights groups say includes forced labour, violence against women and restrictions on movement, marriage and reproduction that breed anger and resentment.

Amnesty called on Burma to accept Rohingyas as citizens, something the government has staunchly opposed because it does not consider them an ethnic group native to Burma.

“Under international human rights law and standards, no one may be left or rendered stateless,” Zawacki said. “For too long Myanmar’s [Burma's] human rights record has been marred by the continued denial of citizenship for Rohingyas and a host of discriminatory practices against them.”

International Community And UN keep Silent On Myanmar massacre: Analyst

By PressTV:

They [international organizations and UN] have never broken their silence or provided a single piece of information about what is going on there… this is a very clear sign that this work is the work of those the powerful that might is right; if you are mighty you give yourself the right to raise the issues that you want and you do not talk about the issues that do not boil down to your interests,” Ibrahim Mousawi told Press TV on Friday.

He also added that people all around the world should voice their anger at the mass slaughter of the minority Muslim group in Myanmar and “tell the whole world they do not agree with the silence of their governments” over the matter.

The government of Myanmar refuses to recognize Rohingyas, who it claims are not natives and classifies as illegal migrants, although the Rohingya are said to be Muslim descendants of Persian, Turkish, Bengali, and Pathan origin, who migrated to Burma as early as the 8th century.

The UN says decades of discrimination have left the Rohingyas stateless, with Myanmar implementing restrictions on their movement and withholding land rights, education and public services.

Reports say 650 Rohingya Muslims were killed as of June 28 alone during clashes in the western region of Rakhine. This is while 1,200 others are missing and 80,000 more have been displaced.

Referring to the acts of violence committed against Muslims in the southeastern Asian country, the analyst added that “this is a matter of racial [prejudice], this is a matter of religious prejudice… The [Myanmar’s] authorities they don’t want to have more Muslims there, we all know that; this is something that has to do with religious backgrounds and with ethnic cleansing.”

This is while even Myanmar’s democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi has kept quiet on the atrocities committed against the Rohingya Muslims.

Ironically, just days after she received a peace prize, Suu Kyi told reporters she did not know if Rohingyas were ‘Burmese’.

 

How the 99% Really Lost Out – In Far Greater Ways Than The Occupy Protesters Imagine

Oldspeak:“Property is theft,” -Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,  French anarchist. When it comes to how the top 1 percent really got so rich, and why the 99 percent lost out. The biggest “theft” by the 1 percent has been of the primary source of wealth – knowledge – for its own benefit. When what is created by all of society for many centuries gets turned into wealth, and, somehow, directly or indirectly, shunted away from the 99 percent by the 1 percent, much of that process, in fact, is reasonably described as “theft.” -Gar Alperovitz. One of the fundamental tenets of “civilization” -property. Gives rise directly and indirectly to many of “civilizations’” ills. Poverty, exploitation, inequality, disenfranchisement, greed, corruption. Enclosure of the commons by a monied few more often than not leads to bad outcomes for most.  Yet we lionize billionaires and the obscenely wealthy, hold them up as models to aspire to. While billions of poor and disenfranchised “externalities” suffer in lives of hopelessness and  despair due in large part to decisions of a few hundred white men the words of Ernesto “Che” Guevara come to mind: ”The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.” “Ignorance Is Strength”

By Gar Alperovitz @ Truthout:

“Property is theft,” French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously declared in 1840 – a judgment clearly shared by many of those involved in the occupations in the name of the 99 percent around the country, and especially when applied to Wall Street bankers and traders. Elizabeth Warren also angrily points out that there “is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody.” Meaning: if the rich don’t pay their fair share of the taxes which educate their workers and provide roads, security and many other things, they are essentially stealing from everyone else.

But this is the least of it: Proudhon may have exaggerated when, for instance, we think of a small farmer working his own land with his own hands. But we now know that he was far closer to the truth than even he might have imagined when it comes to how the top 1 percent really got so rich, and why the 99 percent lost out. The biggest “theft” by the 1 percent has been of the primary source of wealth – knowledge – for its own benefit.

Knowledge? Yes, of course, and increasingly so. The fact is, most of what we call wealth is now known to be overwhelmingly the product of technical, scientific and other knowledge – and most of this innovation derives from socially inherited knowledge, at that. Which means that, except for trivial amounts, it was simply not created by the 1 percent who enjoy the lion’s share of its benefits. Most of it was created, historically, by society – which is to say, minimally, the other 99 percent.

Take a simple example: In our own time, over many decades, the development of the steel plow and the tractor increased one man’s capacity to farm, from a small plot (with a mule and wooden plow) to many hundred acres. What changed over the years to make this possible was a great deal of engineering, steelmaking, chemistry and other knowledge developed by society as a whole.

Another obvious example: Many of the advances that have propelled our high-tech economy in recent decades grew directly out of research programs financed and, often, collaboratively developed, by the federal government and paid for by the taxpayer. The Internet, to take the most well-known example, began as a government defense project, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), in the 1960s. Today’s vast software industry rests on a foundation of computer language and operating hardware developed, in large part, with public support. The Bill Gateses of the world might still be working with vacuum tubes and punch cards were it not for critical research and technology programs created or financed by the federal government after World War II.

The iPhone is another example: Its microchips, cellular communication abilities and global positioning system (GPS) all flowed from developments traceable to significant direct and indirect public support from the military and space programs. The “revolutionary” multi-touch screen was developed by University of Delaware researchers financially supported by the National Science Foundation and the CIA. It is not only electronics: of the 15 modern US-developed “blockbuster” drugs with over $1 billion in sales, 13 received significant public research and development support.

But taxpayer-financed government programs (including, of course, all of public education!) are only the tip of the iceberg. And here we are not talking rhetoric, we are talking the stuff of Nobel prizes. Over the last several decades, economic research has begun to pinpoint much more precisely how much of what we call “wealth” society in general derives from long, steady, century-by-century advances in knowledge – and how much any one individual at any point in time can be said to have earned and “deserved.”

Recent estimates indicate, for instance, that national output per capita has increased more than twentyfold over the 200-plus years since 1800. Output per hour worked has increased an estimated fifteenfold since 1870 alone. Yet the modern person is likely to work each hour with no greater commitment, risk or intelligence than his counterpart from the past. The primary reason for such huge gains is that, on the whole, scientific, technical and cultural knowledge has grown at a scale and pace that far outstrips any other factor in the nation’s economic achievement.

A half-century ago, in 1957, economist Robert Solow showed that nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the 20th century alone, from 1909 to 1949, could only be attributed to technical change in the broadest sense. The supply of labor and capital – what workers and employers contribute – appeared almost incidental to this massive technological “residual.” (Solow received the Nobel Prize for this and related work in 1987.) Another leading economist, William Baumol, calculated that “nearly 90 percent … of current GDP [gross domestic product] was contributed by innovation carried out since 1870.”

The truly central and demanding question is obviously this: If most of what we have today is attributable to knowledge advances that we all inherit in common, why, specifically, should this gift of our collective history not more generously benefit all members of society? The top 1 percent of US households now receives far more income than the bottom 150 million Americans combined. The richest 1 percent of households owns nearly half of all investment assets (stocks and mutual funds, financial securities, business equity, trusts, nonhome real estate). A mere 400 individuals at the top have a combined net worth greater than the bottom 60 percent of the nation taken together. If America’s vast wealth is mainly a gift of our common past, how, specifically, can such disparities be justified?

Early in the American republic, Thomas Paine urged that everything “beyond what a man’s own hands produce” was a gift that came to him simply by living in society, and, hence, “he owes on every principle of justice, of gratitude, and of civilization, a part of that accumulation back again to society from whence the whole came.” Another American reformer, Henry George, challenged what he called “the unearned increment” that is created when population growth and other societal factors increase land values.

To be sure, someone who genuinely makes a real contribution deserves to be rewarded. But Proudhon is right on target for many, many others: when what is created by all of society for many centuries gets turned into wealth, and, somehow, directly or indirectly, shunted away from the 99 percent by the 1 percent, much of that process, in fact, is reasonably described as “theft.” The demand of the occupations that this theft stop, that it be reversed, is also right on target – both in what we know about how wealth is created, and, above all, in what we know about how a just society ought to organize its affairs.

Occupy Wall Street “Counterinsurgency” Has Infiltrated Protests; Seeks To Diffuse Message

Oldspeak:“ If a movement pretends to have no leaders, then it is the corporate media, themselves controlled by Wall Street, who will choose the leaders. A few days ago, a Wall Street protester named Kelly Heresy was anointed as principal honcho by Keith Olbermann, who used to work for the hedge fund called General Electric, and who now works for Al Gore. This is no way to select leaders. The organizers of the Wall Street action say they want to imitate recent protests in other countries. Their favorite is the Tahrir Square agitation in Egypt in February. But if you go to Cairo today, veterans of those demonstrations will tell you that these efforts accomplished relatively little, and mainly had the effect of ousting an oppressive civilian government in favor of an even more oppressive military government of weak CIA puppets which is still operating under martial law, even as benighted religious fanatics gather strength. In a severe world economic depression of the kind we have today, mere protest is not enough. Desperate populations are looking for political leadership with solutions capable of solving the life or death issues facing nations today. A movement which is incapable of specifying what it intends to fight for is an immature movement which no intelligent person will take seriously. The secret of a mass strike upsurge is that crisis conditions will propel many apolitical people into activism. This makes them vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues, including those of the extreme right. The mass strike upsurge by itself solves nothing. The question is whether any coherent group of people can intervene into the mass upsurge and push aside bankrupt and failed leaders with the kind of radical reform program that can actually get the society out of the crisis. The masses cannot discover this program on their own – they are too busy with the struggle for daily existence. College students therefore have a special responsibility to provide ideas for the benefit of the entire society. If an adequate program becomes dominant, the nation can survive. Otherwise, nothing guarantees that civilization itself will not collapse – look at the Tea Party if you don’t believe this. Soros, Koch, and the other finance capitalists have a good working understanding of how these things work, which is why they are sending in their operatives to make sure that this movement will have only the vaguest demands, or no demands at all, to fight for. Let that happen, and Wall Street will rule the day once again. Despite what Michael Moore may think, the political power of Wall Street is considerable, and an effective attack on the bankers will demand the unified efforts of key sectors of the population. This unity must be expressed in the program itself. Students must broaden the sociological scope of the movement to include all walks of life.”-Webster G. Tarpley Something to keep in mind in the nascent stages of this anti-corporate action. The gatekeepers of the status quo are always at work, sabotaging, flummoxing, co-opting, radical movements for change which pose a credible threat to continued operation of the Great Happiness Machine that is Casino Capitalism. Relentlessly grinding up individuality, critical thoughts, hopes and dreams amid gauzy and sensuous clouds of greed, consumption, self-absorption, hedonism, un-reality based entertainment, faux patriotism, faux populism, and infinite variations of pro-corporate education and propaganda.” “Ignorance Is Strength”

By Webster G. Tarpley @ Tarpley.net:

An Emergency Program for Anti-Wall Street Protestors: Don’t Let Soros Hijack the Movement

Political mass strike dynamics have been at work in the United States since the Wisconsin and Ohio mobilizations of February and March. Now, there are demonstrations in lower Manhattan and Boston specifically directed against the Wall Street banks. Another protest demonstration is scheduled for Washington, DC, starting on October 6. Good: a political challenge to Wall Street is indeed long overdue.

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are skeptical in regard to Obama. There is no sizable constituency for Ron Paul, and the crackpot Austrian school of economics is hardly represented. Above all, there is a desire to break the power of Wall Street. This much is promising, but still not enough to win.

The demonstrations appear initially as leaderless groups, engaged in an organic process of discussion from which specific demands are supposed to emerge. But so far, these demonstrations have put forth no specific demands, reforms, or concrete measures whatsoever to fight Wall Street. This is a fatal political weakness. A movement that attempts to go forward with vague slogans like “Freedom” or “Abolish capitalism” is likely to become easy prey for foundation-funded operatives on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

If a movement pretends to have no leaders, then it is the corporate media, themselves controlled by Wall Street, who will choose the leaders. A few days ago, a Wall Street protester named Kelly Heresy was anointed as principal honcho by Keith Olbermann, who used to work for the hedge fund called General Electric, and who now works for Al Gore. This is no way to select leaders.

The demonstrations may appear spontaneous, but it is easy to see gatekeepers and countergangs operating in their midst, often with a frank counterinsurgency agenda. Occupy Wall Street in particular shows the heavy influence of union bureaucrats from the Service Employees International Union, as well as Acorn – both parts of the Obama machine. The goal of these operatives is to keep the focus of the protests vague and diffuse, so that no demands emerge that might be embarrassing to the Wall Street puppet Obama and his reelection campaign. Their ultimate goal is to absorb the protests as the left wing of the Obama 2012 effort. That means supporting an administration which not only refuses to fight Wall Street, but which is packed with Wall Street executives in its highest positions.

Dubious Hollywood figures like Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore are attempting to gain publicity for themselves by showing up at the demonstrations. Michael Moore, who is not very popular with the demonstrators, was instrumental in leading the antiwar and impeachment movements of the past decade back into the Democratic Party to support Obama. Journalist Matt Taibbi, another newly minted expert on the movement, is remembered for his hatchet jobs in favor of the Bush administration theory of terrorism.

The organizers of the Wall Street action say they want to imitate recent protests in other countries. Their favorite is the Tahrir Square agitation in Egypt in February. But if you go to Cairo today, veterans of those demonstrations will tell you that these efforts accomplished relatively little, and mainly had the effect of ousting an oppressive civilian government in favor of an even more oppressive military government of weak CIA puppets which is still operating under martial law, even as benighted religious fanatics gather strength. In Greece, it is true that the trade unions have mounted a dozen general strikes, but all of these have failed to oust Prime Minister Papandreou, the main enforcer of austerity cuts demanded by the International Monetary Fund, and so the brutal austerity continues. The same thing applies to Spain, where the indignados became so self-absorbed in their discussion and consensus process that they never put forward a program to save Spanish society from the bankers. In Iceland too, the anti-bank movement was never able to go beyond mere protest to advance a series of concrete measures that would allow them to contend for power, take power, and hold onto it for the public good.

The lesson of all of these situations is that, in a severe world economic depression of the kind we have today, mere protest is not enough. Desperate populations are looking for political leadership with solutions capable of solving the life or death issues facing nations today. A movement which is incapable of specifying what it intends to fight for is an immature movement which no intelligent person will take seriously.

The secret of a mass strike upsurge is that crisis conditions will propel many apolitical people into activism. This makes them vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues, including those of the extreme right. The mass strike upsurge by itself solves nothing. The question is whether any coherent group of people can intervene into the mass upsurge and push aside bankrupt and failed leaders with the kind of radical reform program that can actually get the society out of the crisis. The masses cannot discover this program on their own – they are too busy with the struggle for daily existence. College students therefore have a special responsibility to provide ideas for the benefit of the entire society. If an adequate program becomes dominant, the nation can survive. Otherwise, nothing guarantees that civilization itself will not collapse – look at the Tea Party if you don’t believe this. Soros, Koch, and the other finance capitalists have a good working understanding of how these things work, which is why they are sending in their operatives to make sure that this movement will have only the vaguest demands, or no demands at all, to fight for. Let that happen, and Wall Street will rule the day once again.

Despite what Michael Moore may think, the political power of Wall Street is considerable, and an effective attack on the bankers will demand the unified efforts of key sectors of the population. This unity must be expressed in the program itself. Students must broaden the sociological scope of the movement to include all walks of life.

In order to fight Wall Street, it is necessary for the American people to understand the basic idea of shifting the cost of the world economic depression off of the backs of working people and the poor where it is now, and onto Wall Street banks and super-rich speculators. Depressions are very expensive. Who should pay for the current depression? The bankers demand that the American people must pay. We want the bankers to pay, and we must specify how. A movement that wants to defend working people against the class warfare of the bankers has the responsibility of putting forward a program to defend middle-class and other working people. In order to win, the anti-Wall Street protests must agitate for a series of demands including the following:

1. Student Loan Amnesty. The common experience of many of the protesters is that of being crushed by an outrageous burden of high interest student loans. Today it is common for graduating seniors to carry $50,000, $75,000, or even $100,000 of debt. Add the costs of an advanced degree in teaching, law, or medicine, and the debt burden becomes astronomical. The exorbitant cost of a college education reflects the increasing immiseration of the United States over the past 40 years, as the overall standard of living has declined by two thirds or more in terms of real wages and other considerations. These debts are owed to the same zombie bankers who cashed in on the Bush bailout of 2008, and the even larger loans issued by Ben Bernanke of the Federal Reserve over recent years. This is a system of brutal primitive accumulation against the life chances everyone who knows that they need a college degree to be employable in the 21st century. Total students loan indebtedness is now approaching $1 trillion. This grinding debt is destroying the futures, the lives, and the hopes of college students and recent graduates.
When a debtor country like Greece is unable to pay its debts, it is normal to hear talk of a haircut for the bondholders and bankers. It is time for the Wall Street zombie banks to take a haircut on student loan debt. Most of this debt cannot be paid off, but an entire generation can be ruined by a futile attempt to pay it back.

A leading demand must therefore be a total cancellation of all outstanding student loan debt, meaning a total and immediate forgiveness of all payments of principal and interest coming from this category of borrowing. Carter granted Vietnam draft resisters an amnesty. If Obama wants to keep his job, he must deliver a student loan amnesty to save not just a single generation, but the entire future of the United States and beyond. Otherwise, dump Obama in 2012! The zombie bankers have been pampered enough. It is time for them to take a bath, so that a generation might live. This is also the best stimulus program possible.

2. Stop Foreclosures. Since students alone will never be enough to make a revolution, it is necessary to put forward additional measures to defend other parts of the population from the depredations of Wall Street. In the area of home foreclosures, the bankers have trampled on the law to seize millions of homes, some of which never had a mortgage, and many of which were current in their payments. The banks have used corrupt robo-signers, robo-cops, and robo-judges to carry out these fraudclosure thefts. The answer is to make foreclosure a federal crime, so that anyone who throws an American family out on the street will end up in Leavenworth. Again, the zombie bankers can eat the losses, which are unavoidable in any case. This is not an impossible demand: under the New Deal, the Frazier-Lemke Act stopped all foreclosures on homes, provided only that the owners could get a minimal payment plan approved by any judge in any court. With the help of popular pressure and public opinion, foreclosures virtually came to a halt. This is what we need to be demanding today.

3. Defend and fully fund the social safety net. Wall Street and Washington elites agree that the American people ought to be subjected to genocidal austerity – cuts so draconian that they will kill people. The goal is obviously to fund bigger and better bailouts of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Chase when they go bankrupt the next time around. Real unemployment in the United States is now about 25%, meaning that 30 million people cannot find work, and many have been looking for years. Therefore, we need to extend jobless benefits to all unemployed, including those who have been out of a job for 99 weeks and more. 46 million Americans are now surviving thanks to Food Stamps, but the reactionary Republicans are demanding savage cuts, and Obama is more than likely to cave. We also need to defend programs that specifically help children and young. These include S-CHIP, which gives health care to poor children; Head Start, which provides breakfast and preschool for poor kids; and WIC, which provides high-protein meals for pregnant women, nursing mothers, and infants. Older people have special problems, including that Wall Street speculators have destroyed the value of their 401(k) and IRA retirement plans. This means that Social Security pensions should be increased, and not cut, as the Republicans and Obama both want. Obama has already cut $500 billion out of Medicare, but he wants to cut it even more, and the Tea Party is eager to help him. The best healthcare would be to open Medicare to all Americans, while making the investments needed to maintain quality. Medicaid gives healthcare to poor people of any age, and these payments must be maintained.

4. Pay for healthcare and social services with a 1% Wall Street Sales Tax. When they hear demands like these, Fox news commentators will demand to know how these programs can be paid for. The answer is simple: the Tobin tax or Wall Street sales tax. Today the total financial turnover of the banksters in terms of buying, selling, and other trading comes to well over three quadrillion dollars yearly – that’s more than 3,000 trillion dollars. The rest of us pay sales tax on most purchases, often including the groceries, but Wall Street zombie bankers and hedge fund hyenas pay absolutely zero on that colossal sum. The most unfair aspect of the entire US tax system is that Wall Street pays virtually no taxes. It is time for the bankers to cough up 1% of every stock, bond, and derivatives transaction, be it program trading, high frequency trading, or computerized flash trading at the rate of one million transactions per second. The total revenue could be split between the federal government and the states, and would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars, perhaps even trillions – depending on how determined the speculators are to keep up their dirty deals. There is nothing impossible about this demand: the federal government had a financial transaction tax from the time of World War I in 1967. And even today, the largely right wing governments of the European Union are about to enact their own Tobin tax. Why can’t it be done here as well?

These are immediate agitational demands that can be readily understood by any person. They can form the leading edge of a struggle to break the political power of Wall Street. In addition, a full recovery from depression and the attainment of full employment for the first time since 1945 will require the nationalization of the Federal Reserve, and the issuing of successive tranches of $1 trillion of 0%, very long-term Federal credit for the building of infrastructure, with a goal of creating 30 million new productive jobs with adequate capital investment per job.

Another essential point is that Wall Street is the biggest nest of warmongers anywhere in the world. Anyone seeking to gain influence over the anti-Wall Street movement should be willing to condemn and denounce Obama’s wanton aggression against Libya, as well as to call for an immediate pullout of US troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Anyone who refuses to do this should be regarded with grave suspicion.

The alternative to such concrete demands is, whether we like it or not, to remain in the orbit of Obama’s Democratic Party. Earlier this year, students, workers, and others occupied the state capitol in Madison, Wisconsin in response to attacks on working people coming from the fascist governor, Walker. The resistance against Walker was betrayed first of all by the Democratic Party, which announced that it would not fight for wages and benefits, but only for trade union rights in the abstract. That is a good program for trade union bureaucrats, but not so good for working people, who bore the brunt of Walker’s austerity. A president who was on the side of the people would have gone immediately to Madison, Wisconsin to hold a town hall on the occupied grounds of the state capitol, an event that would have looked much different than the canned, pre-screened teleprompter town halls Obama likes to address. A real president would have taken Attorney General Holder and Labor Secretary Solis along to investigate the denial of civil rights and labor violations by Walker. Obama did none of these things. Rather, he damned the movement with a few words of faint praise, and cut it loose. The lesson is that the Democratic Party is more than willing to sell out mass struggles anytime it can. And it is only by having your own program of anti-Wall Street demands that you can become independent of the rotten two-party system.

Bay Area Rapid Transit Accused Of Censorship For Blocking Wireless Services To Foil Protests

BART workers remove a man atop a train during a protest at the Civic Center station in San Francisco last month. Authorities closed the station where demonstrators condemned the fatal shooting of a man by transit police the week before.

Oldspeak:” ‘BART may be the first government agency in the U.S. to shutter mobile-internet and phone service in a bid to quash a demonstration.’ ‘I think the problem that we’re dealing with is that we’re finding, all around the country, that folks are playing with the law and trying to figure out how they can have an advantage by shutting down the ways in which the citizens of this country communicate with one another. And this was a testing ground. If we can shut down the BART service here and get away with it, maybe we’ll do it in New York, and then we’ll do it in Chicago, and then we’ll do it at a ball game, and maybe in front of, you know, the college campuses, all under the guise of disrupting and threatening the public safety.’ A glimpse of America’s future. Suppression of your 1st amendment rights to assemble, protest, and petition. A dramatic example of the utter and complete power a nebulous few have over you ability to communicate. And with communication taking place nearly all digitally, via fewer and fewer tightly controlled and monitored modes, that power is profound.  We also get a strong indication of how much of a threat dissent, protest, and civil disobedience, is perceived to be by those few; ‘all under the guise of disrupting and threatening the public safety’. 

By Amy Goodman @ Democracy Now:

The operators of the San Francisco area subway system are facing intense criticism for temporarily cutting off underground cell phone and mobile-internet service at four stations in an attempt to foil a protest. On Thursday, authorities with the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) removed power to underground cell phone towers at four stations to disrupt a protest against the recent death of Charles Hill, a homeless man who was shot dead on a train platform by a BART police officer in July. Police say Hill threw a knife at an officer. According to media reports, BART may be the first government agency in the United States to shutter mobile-internet and phone service in a bid to quash a demonstration. Some have compared the move to former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak’s blockage of internet access across Egypt in January during the popular uprising against his rule. The Federal Communications Commission says it will investigate BART’s decision. We go to San Fransisco to speak with Davey D, a hip-hop journalist and activist who has been covering the protests. He runs the popular website “Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner” at DaveyD.com and is co-host of Hard Knock Radio on KPFA in Berkeley. We’re also joined by Catherine Crump, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project.

Guests:

Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project.

Davey D, hip-hop journalist and activist. He runs the popular website “Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner” at DaveyD.com. He is co-host of Hard Knock Radio on KPFA in Berkeley.

AMY GOODMAN: The operators of the San Francisco subway system are facing intense criticism following their decision last week to temporarily cut off underground cell phone and mobile-internet service at four stations in an attempt to foil a protest. On Thursday night, authorities with the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, removed power to underground cell phone towers at four stations. The decision was made in an effort to disrupt a protest against the recent death of Charles Hill, a homeless man who was shot dead on a train platform in July by a BART police officer. Police say Hill threw a knife at an officer. According to media reports, BART may be the first U.S. government agency to shutter mobile-internet and phone service in a bid to quash a demonstration.

Free speech advocates across the country have condemned the move. Some have compared it to the decision by former Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak who shut down internet access across Egypt in January in an attempt to stifle the growing protest movement. On Twitter, critics of BART’s action took to using the hashtag “Mu-BART-ek.”

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission announced it will investigate BART’s decision. FCC spokesperson Neil Grace said, quote, “We are continuing to collect information about BART’s actions and will be taking steps to hear from stakeholders about the important issues those actions raised, including protecting public safety and ensuring the availability of communications networks.”

On Monday, BART officials were forced to close four stations during the evening rush hour as free speech advocates attempted to disrupt the evening commute. The protest was called by the activist hacker group Anonymous that had hacked into the BART website over the weekend and released personal information about 2,000 transit riders. Later in the program, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the actions of Anonymous and political hackers, but first we’re going to look at this free speech controversy in the Bay Area.

For more, we go to San Francisco to speak with Davey D, hip-hop journalist, activist, who’s been covering the protests. He runs the popular website “Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner” at DaveyD.com and is co-host of Hard Knock Radio on KPFA in Berkeley. We’re also joined in New York by Catherine Crump, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. And in a moment we’ll be joined by an anonymous member of Anonymous; he’ll use the pseudonym X. He was at the BART protest last night.

Davey D, before we talk about the whole free speech issue, explain what happened at the beginning of July. How did this police killing take place, the killing of a homeless man? What do you know?

DAVEY D: Well, what we’re talking about is Charles Hill, who was homeless and was approached by a couple of officers on the Civic CenterBART station. And that’s where it gets murky. According to the police, he had a knife, and he had a beer bottle. And he supposedly put the officers’ lives in danger, so they shot him. But conflicting witnesses say that the officers weren’t in danger and that if he had anything, he could have been easily disarmed.

And just considering the record that BART has had in overreacting and being brutal towards many of its passengers, that sparked these protests. Obviously, BART has footage, but it wasn’t released. And that raised a lot of concern amongst people, because they’re feeling like the first time that—when Oscar Grant was shot, the footage showed that the BART police were in the wrong, in many people’s opinion. So why didn’t we see the footage for this to immediately quell any sort of concern with the public? And I think that’s what kind of brought about the type of protests that you saw.

AMY GOODMAN: And so, there have been a series of protests since police killed Hill on July 2nd?

DAVEY D: Yes, there’s been a couple of them. There’s been a couple of them. And the most notable one was the one in which the BART trains were shut down. I think what happened with BART is that they were caught off guard. What happens is, with the police and many of these agencies, they’ve gotten very used to protest being something that is brought about because people sought permission. This time people didn’t seek permission. They went out, and they protested. And the end result was the downtown BART lines being shut down. And that really upset them. So when the second protest came, the one that we’re talking about last week, or the scheduled one, they decided to shut down all the cell phones. And that, of course, brought about last night’s protest.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey, who spoke to the media shortly after the shooting on July 2nd.

CHIEF KENTON RAINEY: The suspect was—in fact had a bottle, which was used as a weapon. He was also armed with a knife. A confrontation occurred as a result of the suspect’s aggressive actions. And fearing for their safeties, one of the officers discharged his duty weapon, striking the suspect. Paramedics were summoned and responded to the scene.CPR was performed on the suspect before he was transported to the San Francisco General Hospital, where medical personnel pronounced him dead about an hour later.

AMY GOODMAN: Your response to the Linton Johnson, the BARTspokesperson [correction: BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey]?

DAVEY D: Well, if you rewind the tape and listen to the type of explanation that BART had for the shooting of Oscar Grant, we don’t take BART’s word at—we don’t take BART’s word when they immediately give it. They’re always going to be suspect, because we feel that, initially, they lied about a lot of these incidents. So, of course they’re going to give the best story forward, that he was armed, the police were in trouble, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. Nobody buys it. It’s like, if that’s really the case, show us the footage. Let everybody see it. Let’s have the transparency that I think the citizens of the Bay Area and around the country would really like to have. And so, that didn’t really happen. And so, once you started to hear that there were witnesses that had conflicting reports, then it was really on and popping. Everybody feels that they’re covering things up and they’re not really being forthright.

AMY GOODMAN: I just want to correct that. That was the BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey who we just heard. So let’s talk about the protests.

DAVEY D: Right. Well, I mean, even—whatever the agency, I mean, BARTpolice chief, you know, BART spokespeople, it’s the same bag, as far as most people are concerned.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the protests that just took place and the shutting down of the internet service at four BART stations, Davey D.

DAVEY D: Well, there was a scheduled protest last Thursday, and in reaction to the protest that actually shut down the BART trains, they decided that they were going to shut off cell service. And then they used the excuse that public safety—and I think that’s what raised a lot of concern: public safety for who? We’ve had flash mobs go up on the BARTtrain and do dances on the platform and disrupt traffic for a little bit; we haven’t seen them shut down the cell phones for that. I’ve been on theBART trains where there’s been fights after Raider games and after other sporting events; they haven’t shut down the BART trains for that. So, in this case, you have people protesting the police, and now they want to shut it down and say it’s public safety. I think the key word there is “public safety,” because then that sets a precedent for anybody to shut down cell service under the guise of public safety. They could shut it down in front of a ballpark, they could shut it down if you’re on the streets, they could shut it down at any rally, under the guise of public safety.

The other point that I think we need to also consider is the fact that they were saying that the protesters were coordinating with the cell phones. Well, first of all, most protesters don’t really need cell phones to coordinate. A good protester, at least the ones out in San Francisco, have been protesting long before there’s been internet, Facebook, Twitter and all that, so they got their game on lock. But with that being said, the police can also coordinate with communications devices, as well. And just considering the type of laws we have on the books, from PATRIOT Acts and all types of things that allow the police to peer and follow you on Twitter and Facebook and all that, I think that any sort of protest that people are doing, the police probably have infiltrated you, either in your rank-and-file membership or even—or definitely online. So they know what’s going on at any given point.

I think the problem that we’re dealing with is that we’re finding, all around the country, that folks are playing with the law and trying to figure out how they can have an advantage by shutting down the ways in which the citizens of this country communicate with one another. And this was a testing ground. If we can shut down the BART service here and get away with it, maybe we’ll do it in New York, and then we’ll do it in Chicago, and then we’ll do it at a ball game, and maybe in front of, you know, the college campuses, all under the guise of disrupting and threatening the public safety. So I don’t buy it. And I think that, you know, just being at the protest yesterday and seeing that BART shut down the Civic Center, when there really wasn’t anything going on, said to me that this is a dog and pony show and that they’re trying to win the battle of public opinion by getting the mainstream media to follow their talking points, make it seem like it was a real big crisis when it really wasn’t. If I show you the footage from what took place at the Civic Center, you would question: why did you close the Civic Center when there was nothing going on? That, to me, said a whole lot about their motivation. And their motivation wasn’t public safety. It’s to win public opinion and maybe set a precedent for other agencies later down the road.

AMY GOODMAN: BART spokesperson Linton Johnson appeared on the San Francisco radio station KQED Monday and defended BART’s actions.

LINTON JOHNSON: Well, here’s how I respond to anybody who questions this gut-wrenching decision that we were forced to make by a group that had proven in the past that they were wanting to create chaos on the platform and were going to make it even more chaotic had we let it happen. As you will remember, there was somebody who jumped on top of the train car. My heart stopped. That moment when I saw that happen, I was scared to death that that guy would hurt himself or kick in a window and splatter glass all over one of our other passengers, violating another constitutional right that people aren’t talking about, and that is the constitutional right to safety. And on the platform, the constitutional right to safety is paramount. The right to be able to express your opinion ends, basically, at the fare gate, where you have to have a ticket. So the paid area is where it ends. And the reason for that is because we can’t have chaos on the platform, because people get hurt.

AMY GOODMAN: BART spokesperson Linton Johnson on KQED in San Francisco. Catherine Crump also with us, joining Davey D, staff attorney at the ACLU. Can you respond?

CATHERINE CRUMP: There’s no question that what happened in San Francisco sets a terrible precedent. It’s the first known incident that we’ve heard of where the government has shut down a cell phone network in order to prevent people from engaging in political protest. Cell phone networks are something we’ve all come to rely on. People use them for all sorts of communication that have nothing to do with protest. And this is really a sweeping and overbroad reaction by the police.

AMY GOODMAN: What other information do you have about what police are doing with cell phones around the country, at the ACLU?

CATHERINE CRUMP: Yeah, cell phones have been in the news frequently recently, not just—because they’ve become such a vital part of our lives. One big issue these days is the use of cell phones as tracking devices. Police around the country are using cell phones to track people’s movements. And frequently, they’re not even getting a warrant based on probable cause. Just last week, we filed 365 Public Records Act requests around the country with police departments, big and small, to try to get a better perspective on the degree to which cell phones are being used as surveillance tools. So these new devices are raising all sorts of constitutional issues that we’ve just never had to confront before.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean they don’t even get warrants when they’re tracking your phone? How do they do it, then?

CATHERINE CRUMP: They frequently go to court, and they show a lower standard than the full probable cause standard. They show that it’s irrelevant to an ongoing investigation, which is far less than showing that they have probable cause to believe that tracking someone’s location will turn up evidence of wrongdoing. The constitutional ground here is really unsettled, and the police have been taking advantage of that to engage in really massive amounts of cell phone tracking without meeting the full probable cause standard. And we believe that violates the Fourth Amendment, which gives you a right to be free from unreasonable searches. And we don’t think there’s anything reasonable about tracking people’s locations without showing probable cause.

AMY GOODMAN: The ACLU met with the police chief yesterday in San Francisco?

CATHERINE CRUMP: We did. And what we were really looking—

AMY GOODMAN: You met with him?

CATHERINE CRUMP: I did not, but my colleagues did. And what we were really looking for out of that meeting was a guarantee that this would never happen again. And unfortunately, the police chief was not able to provide that kind of assurance. And so, we are going to continue exploring what options we can do to try to guarantee that this never happens again.

AMY GOODMAN: What did he say?

CATHERINE CRUMP: You know, it was a very short and inconclusive meeting that didn’t give us any sort of reassurance. And we’re really in new territory here. We’d really like to see a policy change, that they put into writing that this doesn’t happen frequently. We’ve put on our websitea place where people can go to take action to ask—to ask for this sort of thing not to happen again. And we’re continuing to see what other sorts of pressure we can put on the government here.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break. Catherine Crump, staff attorney at the ACLU. Davey D, hip-hop journalist and activist, runs the popular website “Davey D’s Hip Hop Corner” at DaveyD.com and is a co-host at Pacifica Radio KPFA’s Hard Knock Radio in Berkeley. This isDemocracy Now! When we come back, we’ll also be joined by others, including an anonymous member of Anonymous, which hacked the BARTwebsite, and we’ll talk about the information that they released.