The decision of the voters in Washington and Colorado to legalize and regulate marijuana much like alcohol, and the passage of medical marijuana in Massachusetts balanced by rejection in Oregon and Arkansas, I believe, is the beginning of the end of Prohibition. This issue is also going to become a significant part of the growing trend of schism amongst the bio-regions, I believe.
Social progressives should step forward and say, “You know, you guys on the right are correct.” We too embrace states rights.
Washington State and Colorado made history tonight by becoming the first states in the United States – to approve the legal regulation of marijuana.
James Quinn is one of my favorite writers of what is going on in America today. I particularly like today’s write up. It is thought provoking. One can find similarities of Quinn’s message in the material of Jim Sinclair, Martin Armstrong and Bud Kress (died this year).
He makes an interesting projection that we will see a Romney win tomorrow… While that is likely, it is equally likely that the major change comes in Martin Armstrong’s prediction with the election of 2016…
Strauss & Howe wrote these words in 1997. They had predicted the arrival of another Crisis in this time frame in their previous book Generations, written in 1990. This wasn’t guesswork on their part. They understood the dynamics of how generations interact and how the mood of the country shifts every twenty or so years based upon the generational alignment that occurs as predictably as the turning of the seasons. The last generation that lived through the entire previous Crisis from 1929 through 1946 has virtually died off. This always signals the onset of the next Fourth Turning. The housing bubble and its ultimate implosion created the spark for the current Crisis that began in September 2008, with the near meltdown of the worldwide financial system. Just as the stock market crash of 1929, the election of Lincoln in 1860, and the Boston Tea Party in 1773 catalyzed a dramatic mood change in the country, the Wall Street created financial collapse in 2008 has ushered in a twenty year period of agony, suffering, war and ultimately the annihilation of the existing social order.
A new documentary, Shift Change, explores a kind of company where the workers are also the owners, which results in a quite different economic model than we’re used to.
In an era when income disparities and anger with financial institutions in the U.S. are generating powerful social movements, it’s not surprising that people are starting to look towards alternative business models. Shift Change, a new movie from filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, looks at the world of worker cooperatives, where reasonable salaries, job security, and general work satisfaction prevail.
Nowhere are the benefits of this model more obvious than in the Mondragon Corporation, a giant federation of worker cooperatives in the Basque region of Spain (there’s nothing about dragons involved, it was founded in a town called Mondragon) that works in finance, retail operations, production of consumer goods and industrial components, and more. Co.Exist spoke with Young about her experiences making the film, and visiting the notoriously closed-off Mondragon Corporation.
One of the most urgent tasks for the international community in 2013 must surely be to lift Israel’s cruel siege of Gaza — now entering its sixth year — and end the misguided boycott of its Hamas government. There is hardly a more flagrant example of injustice in the world today than the situation of the 1.6 million inhabitants of this hugely over-crowded Strip — many of them refugees driven out of Palestine by the new Israeli state in 1947-48. They must be allowed to live a normal life — to travel, to manufacture, to trade, to educate their children — free from the constant danger of Israeli air strikes.
French scholar Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor at the prestigious Institute of Political Science in Paris, has published an important 400-page history of Gaza, from ancient times to the disturbed present. His Histoire de Gaza (Editions Fayard, Paris, 2012) is the most comprehensive ever written and should be required reading for all those concerned with the long agony of the Palestinians in their struggle for statehood.
It is impossible in a short article to do justice to Filiu’s sweeping narrative, meticulous research and detailed findings, but it is perhaps worth pointing out that he lays blame for the as yet unresolved and indeed worsening crisis on three main actors:
first and foremost on Israel, concerned only with its own security and brutally indifferent to Palestinian life;
secondly, on Fatah and Hamas, those old rivals, still locked in a fratricidal struggle as if unaware that their national cause is slipping away before their eyes;
and thirdly, on the humanitarian aid provided by the international community which has kept Gaza’s population alive but has also, paradoxically, prevented Gaza’s economic development and its efforts at self-sufficiency.
Phi Beta Iota: Gaza is the worst of 5,000 distinct geo-cultural communities under seige. It represents the complete absence of ethics in Western “diplomacy.”
The subject of insiders — or “whistleblowers” — is somewhat tricky; anyone on the inside is often presumed to be compromised by their former allegiance. Nonetheless, the nature of government work is rooted in compartmentalization. So, perhaps the best indication as to whether whistleblowers have something valid to say is the level of persecution they have endured.
The following whistleblowers have endured a varying degree of pushback from the system, but are still around to reveal key points of information that make us all question what we are being told by our government and the corporate media.
List Only, In Order Presented:
01 Jesslyn Radack, Department of Justice
02 Thomas Drake, National Security Agency
03 William Binney, National Security Agency
04 Matt Klein, AT&T for the National Security Agency
05 Sibel Edmonds, Federal Bureau of Investigation
06 Susan Linauer, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Justice
07 Anthony Shaffer, Department of Defense
08 Joe Banister, Internal Revenue Service
09 Bradley Manning, Departments of Defense and State
10 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks
Local Boy Scout leaders, police officials, prosecutors and mayors helped hush up numerous child sex abuse allegations against scoutmasters and other volunteers, according to details in a trove of nearly 15,000 pages of so-called “perversion files” compiled by the Scouts from 1959 to the mid-1980s.
The Associated Press obtained copies of the files weeks in advance and conducted an extensive review of them.
The files document allegations of sex abuse by Scouting volunteers across the country. The Scouts have been collecting the documents since the early 1900s, and continue to do so.
At the news conference, Clark blasted the Boy Scouts for their continuing legal battles to try to keep the full trove of files secret.
“You do not keep secrets hidden about dangers to children,” said Clark, who in 2010 won a landmark lawsuit against the Boy Scouts on behalf of a plaintiff who was molested by an assistant scoutmaster in the 1980s.
Clark's colleague, Paul Mones, said the files in the Portland case represent “the pain and anguish of thousands of Scouts” who were abused by Scout leaders.
Jeffrey St Claire, the editor at Counterpunch has given me permission to distribute the attached essay, “The Arab Spring at the Crossroads,” by Esam Al-Amin. It was published in the subscription edition of Counterpunch and is not available at the CP website. Al-Amin, who I do not know, has written a very informative summary of the crosscurrents now shaping the Arab world. This is a subject of very great importance to the welfare of all Americans. I urge you to read it carefully.
In addition to being informative, Al-Amin's essay is a prime example of the quality of the information now available in what the mainstream media likes to call the alternative press. This brings me to my second reason for writing this blaster. Counterpunch is having a rare fundraising drive and I am taking what for me is an unprecedented action of urging you to contribute. I think it is important to support alternative news/opinion outlets like Antiwar.com, Truthout, Alternet, and especially, since I am biased, Counterpunch. (Truth in advertising: I counted the late editor Alex Cockburn and still count his co-editor Jeffrey St Claire as friends.)
So, I urge you read the essay below — you can determine whether or not you think it stands on its own merits. If you feel this is the kind of info worth paying a little for, I encourage you to think about purchasing a subscription or a gift sub for a friend or relative or sending a small tax-deductible donation to CP's secure sever. The Counterpunchers promise they won’t contact you to shake you down for more money or sell your name to any lists–not Karl Rove’s and especially not MoveOn’s. To contribute by phone you can call Becky or Deva toll free at: 1-800-840-3683
CounterPunch Volume 19 Number 17, >October 1-15, 2012, published October 2, 2012
Ever since Napoléon Bonaparte invaded Egypt in 1798, the relationship between the West and the Arab-Muslim East has been contentious and convoluted. Although this military leader of the first French Republic conquered Egypt for strategic reasons in his rivalry with the British and the Ottomans, the Muslim Arabs of the region – later dubbed “the Middle East” by an American naval officer – felt vulnerable, exposed, and weak.
