National Organizations

Click below to check 'em out and order a deck or two.  These are beautiful playing cards, a full deck of 52 plus a joker, information cards, and a box with directions for making a citizen's arrest inside.  You can play any card game and, at the same time, learn a little about the top 53 U.S. war criminals (and what you can do to hold them accountable). Click here:

https://codepink.myshopify.com/products/war-criminal-playing-cards

This project originated 10 months ago when AfterDowningStreet produced a list of the top 50 U.S. war criminals, a thousand voices proposed making a deck of cards, and CODE PINK volunteered to do it.  Some changes have been made to the line-up, however, and you'll have to buy the cards to see who made the final cut.  Below are links to related pages on AfterDowningStreet and CODE PINK:

http://afterdowningstreet.org/warcriminals

http://www.codepinkalert.org/section.php?id=414

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The Democrats' scam becomes more transparent
By Glenn Greenwald | Salon

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about what seemed to be a glaring (and quite typical) scam perpetrated by Congressional Democrats:  all year long, they insisted that the White House and a majority of Democratic Senators vigorously supported a public option, but the only thing oh-so-unfortunately preventing its enactment was the filibuster:  sadly, we have 50 but not 60 votes for it, they insisted.  Democratic pundits used that claim to push for "filibuster reform," arguing that if only majority rule were required in the Senate, then the noble Democrats would be able to deliver all sorts of wonderful progressive reforms that they were truly eager to enact but which the evil filibuster now prevents.  In response, advocates of the public option kept arguing that the public option could be accomplished by reconciliation -- where only 50 votes, not 60, would be required -- but Obama loyalists scorned that reconciliation proposal, insisting (at least before the Senate passed a bill with 60 votes) that using reconciliation was Unserious, naive, procedurally impossible, and politically disastrous.

But all those claims were put to the test -- all those bluffs were called -- once the White House decided that it had to use reconciliation to pass a final health care reform bill.  That meant that any changes to the Senate bill (which had passed with 60 votes) -- including the addition of the public option -- would only require 50 votes, which Democrats assured progressives all year long that they had.  Great news for the public option, right?  Wrong.  As soon as it actually became possible to pass it, the 50 votes magically vanished.  Senate Democrats (and the White House) were willing to pretend they supported a public option only as long as it was impossible to pass it.  Once reconciliation gave them the opportunity they claimed all year long they needed -- a "majority rule" system -- they began concocting ways to ensure that it lacked 50 votes. Read more.

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By David Swanson

Congressman David Obey (D., Wis.) is the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. He's in charge of spending our money. For years he spent it on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without any resistance.  Until last October, Obey maintained that spending hundreds of billions of our dollars on wars was something he just had no choice about.

Three years ago, 180,000 people watched this Youtube video, which was also shown on tv news shows, of Obey screaming at a military mother and denouncing "idiot liberals" for suggesting that Congress use the power of the purse to end wars. Liberals debated other liberals on the question of whether we really were idiots. Now Obey has taken several steps in the direction of joining us.

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By David Swanson

Would the United States military lie about how four Marines were killed? Would abuse continue at Abu Ghraib after the scandal exploded? Any soldier you talk to has a story you may not want to hear. I recently had occasion to speak with two that were particularly troubling.

Part I: Snipers Dead in Ramadi:

Here's a military report from August 2006 on how four Marines died in Iraq in 2004. Christian Lowe, a Marine Corps Times staff writer, tells us:

"It was supposed to be a mission like many they had done in Iraq. Ride the Humvees to a position at a building abutting a busy street in Ramadi. Relieve the four Marines on the roof there. . . .

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Bill Moyers Journal featured a discussion with Dr. Marcia Angell, a physician and first woman editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. She is now a Harvard professor in the Department of Social Medicine. In this clear and concise discussion, Dr. Angell explains what is wrong with the proposed health insurance reform legislation and the coming consequences.

Excerpts:

• What this bill does is not only permit the commercial insurance industry to remain in place, but it actually expands and cements their position as the lynchpin of health care reform.
• Not only does it keep them in place, but it pours about 500 billion dollars of public money into these companies over 10 years. And it mandates that people buy these companies' products for whatever they charge.
• It will take money out of Medicare and put it into the private sector. Medicare is the source for a lot of the funds that are going to go to subsidize the private health insurance industry.
• ...we have chosen, alone among all advanced countries, to leave health care to for-profit industries, to leave health care to businesses that then distribute health care as a market commodity according to the ability to pay and not according to medical need.
• Senator Rockefeller referred to the private insurance companies as rapacious, rapacious, and said, "Like sharks, they swim under the water, and you don't know they're there until you feel their teeth." Now there are not many people in America who would disagree with that description and so what this plan does is says, "This is a terrible industry, so let's force people to buy their commercial products. And let's subsidize it and put a lot of money into it." Read or watch entire interview.

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Days before torture memo architect John Yoo speaks at University of Virginia (protest plans), two New York artists are to present a new composition in Charlottesville built around excerpts of poetry written by prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

Composer Annea Lockwood and new music baritone Thomas Buckner will perform their latest collaboration, In Our Name, in a concert at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative on Saturday March 13, 8pm.

In Our Name draws upon poetry by three prisoners, Jumah Al Dossari, Emad Abdullah Hassan and Osama Abu Kabir, whose work first came to prominence through the publication of 2007 anthology, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, edited by Marc Falkoff, University of Iowa Press.

Forbidden access to pen or paper, some of the Guantanamo prisoners wrote poetry using toothpaste or by scratching onto styrophone cups with pebbles. The US military has declared that poetry coming from Guantanamo "presents a special risk", and that allegorical imagery might convey coded messages to outside militants. But speaking to the Independent, Falkoff argued that the poems' real potency lies in the "power of words to make people outside realize that these are human beings who have not had their day in court."

Annea Lockwood is a composer and sound artist known for her use of environmental sound and life narratives, from her infamous piano burnings of the 60s and 70s to her recordings of volcanoes, earthquakes and the Hudson and Danube rivers. In 2000 Lockwood was included in the Whitney Museum's major sound art retrospective, I Am Sitting in a Room: Sound Works by American Artists 1950-2000. Her numerous compositions include Jitterbug, commissioned by Merce Cunningham Dance Company for the dance eyeSpace.

Thomas Buckner, a former student of legendary Metropolitan Opera baritone Martial Singher, and trained in the classical tradition, has for the last forty years dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. Along the way, Buckner has performed with many of the world's top musicians, including Roscoe Mitchell, Phill Niblock, Gerald Oshita, Borah Bergman, Wu Man and Earl Howard. More than 70 composers have created works for him, including Robert Ashley, Morton Subotnick, Annea Lockwood and Alvin Lucier.

To request more information or arrange interviews, please contact Raymond Beegle at booking@thomasbuckner.com.

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Health Reform Myths
By Paul Krugman | NY Times

So what’s the reality of the proposed reform? Compared with the Platonic ideal of reform, Obamacare comes up short. If the votes were there, I would much prefer to see Medicare for all.

Health reform is back from the dead. Many Democrats have realized that their electoral prospects will be better if they can point to a real accomplishment. Polling on reform — which was never as negative as portrayed — shows signs of improving. And I’ve been really impressed by the passion and energy of this guy Barack Obama. Where was he last year?

But reform still has to run a gantlet of misinformation and outright lies. So let me address three big myths about the proposed reform, myths that are believed by many people who consider themselves well-informed, but who have actually fallen for deceptive spin.

The first of these myths, which has been all over the airwaves lately, is the claim that President Obama is proposing a government takeover of one-sixth of the economy, the share of G.D.P. currently spent on health.

Well, if having the government regulate and subsidize health insurance is a “takeover,” that takeover happened long ago. Medicare, Medicaid, and other government programs already pay for almost half of American health care, while private insurance pays for barely more than a third (the rest is mostly out-of-pocket expenses). And the great bulk of that private insurance is provided via employee plans, which are both subsidized with tax exemptions and tightly regulated. Read more.

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AFRICOM's First War: U.S. Directs Large-Scale Offensive In Somalia
Rick Rozoff | Stop NATO | Blog site

Over 43 people have been killed in the Somali capital of Mogadishu in the past two days in fighting between Shabab (al-Shabaab) insurgent forces, who on March 10 advanced to within one mile of the nation's presidential palace, and troops of the U.S.-backed Transitional Federal Government. The fighting has just begun.

The last ambassador of the United States to Somalia (1994-1995), Daniel H. Simpson, penned a column for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on March 10 in which which he posed the question "why, apart from the only lightly documented charge of Islamic extremism among the Shabab, is the United States reengaging in Somalia at this time?"

He answered it in stating "Part of the reason is because the United States has its only base in Africa up the coast from Mogadishu, in Djibouti, the former French Somaliland. The U.S. Africa Command was established there in 2008, and, absent the willingness of other African countries to host it, the base in Djibouti became the headquarters for U.S. troops and fighter bombers in Africa.

"Flush with money, in spite of the expensive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Department of Defense obviously feels itself in a position to undertake military action in Africa, in Somalia." [1]

Fulfilling its appointed role, the New York Times leaked U.S. military plans for the current offensive in Somalia on March 5 in a report titled "U.S. Aiding Somalia in Its Plan to Retake Its Capital." (Note that the Transitional Federal Government is presented as Somalia itself and Mogadishu as its capital.)

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Falluja's birth defects
By Riz Kahn | Al Jazeera

Joining the conversation will be Dr Muhamad Tareq al-Darraji who authored the report Prohibited Weapons Crisis about the impact of the US military assault on the Falluja population, and Dahr Jamail, an American journalist who reported extensively from Iraq on the US invasion and its aftermath.

Doctors in the Iraqi city of Falluja are handling up to 15 times as many birth defects as they were one year ago.

The chronic deformities include multiple tumours, heart problems, nervous system anomalies and eye deficiencies.

Residents of the city blame the surge in chronic deformities on controversial weapons used by US forces against Sunni fighters in 2004.

White phosphorus and depleted uranium shells were allegedly among the munitions used.

Most doctors are unsure about the reasons for the surge in birth deformities over the past year but say it could be a result of the chemicals left over from the fighting.

Send us your views and get your voice on the air

The US military has dismissed those allegations. Read more.

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By David Swanson

Tom Hayden wants peace, but he's sincerely mistaken about how to get it. He claims that Wednesday's unsuccessful vote to end the war in Afghanistan makes ending the war less likely, and that the way to end the war is to pass a bill that would then have to pass the Senate and the President, a bill requiring an exit strategy, any exit strategy -- it could be "redeployment" to Iran in 2038 or anything else.

I'm not against moving bills forward, even meaningless bills if they send a helpful message. I'm not against ending the war in a way that leaves the president in charge of Congress, if that proves the fastest way to end the war -- even though it leaves us in a state in which more wars are inevitable. I don't think we're especially likely to force the House to cut off the funding next month.

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Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

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March 10, 2010 - Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich brought up a resolution Wednesday to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. The bill was drafted to make Congress "claim responsibility for the troop casualties." The measure failed after a 65-356 vote.

As the Progressive Democrats of America nationally endorsed Democratic candidate, I am personally calling on you to stand up for our children, neighbors and communities. My primary opponent supports the “surge” and so does our incumbent, Brian Bilbray.

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Israeli Settlement Expansions Continue
By Stephen Lendman

Currently, around 500,000 Jews reside illegally in over 120 West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements as well as dozens of outposts. Their numbers grow daily despite occasional pledges to curtail or slow them, the latest last November when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 10 month freeze, calling it a move to "help launch meaningful negotiations to reach a historic peace agreement that would finally end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians."

Never mind Israel's history of past peace process futility because all previous efforts were more pretense than real, or as some Palestinians say - How can they negotiate in good faith without a willing partner? They've never had one and don't in Netanyahu, an extremist hard-right zealot.

The same holds for a settlement freeze, just rhetoric with no substance, especially given Israel's plan to make all Jerusalem a Jewish city, according to Netanyahu. During a May 22, 2009 Jerusalem Day ceremony (commemorating the city's 1967 reunification), he declared:

"United Jerusalem is Israel's capital. Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided."

For East Jerusalem Palestinians, it means removing them one settlement expansion and home demolition at a time.

So much for the peace process and freeze, evidenced by a February 26 Haaretz report saying Israel "plans to build another 600 homes in East Jerusalem" on Occupied Palestinian land.

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Tom of TomDispatch.com wrote:

Yes, you've heard plenty about Bernie Madoff and his $65 billion Ponzi scheme, and maybe even about Allen Stanford, the garrulous Texan who built a sprawling Caribbean compound from his $8 billion Ponzi scheme. But what about "mini Madoff," "Miami Madoff" and "Montreal Madoff"? What about all the fraudulent real-estate schemes and farm-grain schemes or the Ponzi built on investments in state-worker uniforms and the one that siphoned off retirement funds from bus drivers? What about the two brothers in Williamstown, Michigan, themselves bilked in a Ponzi scheme, who turned from prey to predator, and used their church and family ties to bilk neighbors out of $50 million for nonexistent gas and oil exploration in the Southwest?

TomDispatch associate editor and regular contributor Andy Kroll has done a remarkable job of mapping the U.S. as a coast-to-coast "Ponzi nation" at a time when an open credit spigot, a booming housing market, and visions of unimaginable wealth on Wall Street left practically every American with dreams of future riches. It was an extraordinary era, one that may have left the "roaring Twenties" in the dust, and its legacy, as Kroll lays it out, is a mood that has its own striking dangers. As he writes, "Disillusionment with the past decade is such that many Americans now simply assume that our world is little but a giant Ponzi scheme."

Kroll concludes: "Ours is now a Ponzi nation. There is a new mood in the land. Just how it will play out is unknown, but a sense of having been conned is still spreading -- as if not just surprising numbers of investors, but the whole country had experienced the last days of a giant Ponzi scheme. With it goes a feeling that what we’ve been living through, even in 'the best of times,' wasn’t an American dream, but pure nightmare. Welcome to America, sucker."

Tomgram: Andy Kroll, Welcome to America, Sucker
By Andy Kroll | TomDispatch

"I landed in this country with $2.50 in cash and $1 million in hopes, and those hopes never left me," Charles Ponzi once told the New York Times. An Italian, who emigrated to the New World in 1903, his glory, such as it was, involved leaving countless immigrants and other Americans with only $2.50 in their pockets and nothing to hope for.

While he was hardly the first Ponzi schemer, he milked his particular con with particular success and dramatic flare in the 1920s. Ever since, his name has been attached to any scam in which you promise outrageous returns -- he offered a 50% return on investment in only 45 days -- and pay off old investors with the money eagerly offered by newer ones. The aura of success only brings in more money until, of course, it all goes bust. Ponzi’s last recorded words to a reporter caught the financial-showman spirit of his time: “Even if they never got anything for it,” he said of those whose lives he destroyed, “it was cheap at that price. Without malice aforethought I had given them the best show that was ever staged in their territory since the landing of the Pilgrims! It was easily worth fifteen million bucks to watch me put the thing over." Read more.

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China reports on US human rights record
Submitted by Michael Munk | www.MichaelMunk.com

China Friday retorted US criticism by publishing its own report on the US human rights record.

"As in previous years, the (US) reports are full of accusations of the human rights situation in more than 190 countries and regions including China, but turn a blind eye to, or dodge and even cover up rampant human rights abuses on its own territory," said the Information Office of the State Council in its report on the US human rights record.

The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009 was in retaliation to the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009 issued by the US Department of State on March 11.

The report is "prepared to help people around the world understand the real situation of human rights in the United States," said the report.

The report reviewed the human rights record of the United States in 2009 from six perspectives: life, property and personal security; civil and political rights; economic, social and cultural rights; racial discrimination; rights of women and children; and the US' violation of human rights against other countries.

It criticized the United States for taking human rights as "a political instrument to interfere in other countries' internal affairs, defame other nations' image and seek its own strategic interests."

China advised the US government to draw lessons from the history, put itself in a correct position, strive to improve its own human rights conditions and rectify its acts in the human rights field.

This is the 11th consecutive year that the Information Office of China's State Council has issued a human rights record of the United States to answer the US State Department's annual report.

"At a time when the world is suffering a serious human rights disaster caused by the US subprime crisis-induced global financial crisis, the US government still ignores its own serious human rights problems but revels in accusing other countries. It is really a pity," the report said.

SPYING ON CITIZENS Read more.

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Rep. Dennis Kucinich Takes on Democratic Leaders with Insistence on Public Option, Call for Afghan Withdrawal

Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich joins us to discuss two House debates in which he’s played a central role this week. The Ohio Democrat is threatening to vote against his party’s healthcare reform package because it does not contain a robust public option. Meanwhile, Kucinich’s bill to force the withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan was taken up on Wednesday. After a rare three-and-a-half-hour debate on the war, the majority of House Democrats joined with Republicans to defeat the measure. [includes rush transcript]

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