Workers at the Regency Ceramics factory in India raided the home of their boss, and beat him senseless with lead pipes after a wage dispute turned ugly.
The workers were enraged enough to kill Regency’s president K. C. Chandrashekhar after their union leader, M. Murali Mohan, was killed by baton-wielding riot police on Thursday. The labor violence occurred in Yanam, a small city in Andra Pradesh state on India’s east coast. Police were called to the factory by management to quell a labor dispute. The workers had been calling for higher pay and reinstatement of previously laid off workers since October. Murali was fired a few hours after the police left the factory.
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India’s factory workers are the lowest paid within the big four emerging markets. Per capita income in India is under $4,000 a year, making it the poorest country in the BRICs despite its relatively booming economy.
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Once news of Murali’s death spread, the factory workers allegedly destroyed 50 company cars, buses and trucks and lit them on fire. They ransacked the factory. Residents joined hands with around 600 workers, while others were enroute to Chandrashekhar’s house.
Phi Beta Iota: A very famous experiment in the 1970's added one rat at a time to an empty aquarium, and found that at the same point each time, there was a crowding “tipping point” at which the rats would begin eating each other. The world is ready to explode. The resource split between the 1% and the 99% is unsustainable.
Most discussions of possible United States military operations in the Persian Gulf, should Iran try to prevent maritime traffic from going through the Strait of Hormuz, generally say that while it would not be a cakewalk, it would not be an enormously difficult task either.
But that conventional wisdom is wrong, according to a recent report issued by an independent, non-profit public policy research institute in Washington DC. The report found that the traditional post-Cold War US military ability to project power overseas with few serious challenges to its freedom of action may be rapidly drawing to a close.
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It stressed that “a Strait of Hormuz closure could trigger a much larger price spike, including by limiting offsetting supplies from other producers in the region”.
Phi Beta Iota: Two themes are emerging in the open source world. First, the depth and breadth of Israel's clandestine agreements with its Arab neighbors is not clearly understood–a National Intelligence Estimate is required, but the collection, processing, and analysis capabilities are simply not there, and the management will to do this as a multinational task is not there either. Second, as the US loses its ability to actually project force, the finance of war is being replaced by the theater of war, such that oil prices can still be manipulated, but at a fraction of the blood, sweat, and tears previously mobilized – financial fraud on the cheap, as it were.
15 Things More Important Than Newt's Sex Life on the Moon
1. A war on Iran could kill us all. President Obama said in the State of the Union: “America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal. But a peaceful resolution of this issue is s till possible . . . if Iran changes course.” So, unless Iran, which the Secretary of Defense says is not developing a nuclear weapon, ceases developing a nuclear weapon, we're going to war. Sound familiar? Ever seen this movie before? Actually, we've seen it in every single war ever fought by any nation. The best defense against the lies of the Department of Defense is good preparation. Read this book: http://WarIsALie.org
2. Occupation of DC under threat. The Park Service plans to try to remove all tents from both DC occupations (Freedom Plaza and McPherson Square) at noon on Monday, January 30th. Be there. Be nonviolent. Be determined. Be relentless.
Rise like Lions after slumber: In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew: Which in sleep had fallen on you Ye are many — they are few
3. California could solve healthcare. California has until Tuesday and is two senators away from enacting single-payer healthcare. This is far more significant that anything that has been done at the national level for healthcare. This solves the problem in one state and creates a model for the other 49. You can help: http://warisacrime.org/node/60764
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4. Corporate personhood is on the defensive. The Montana Supreme Court has refused to comply with Citizens United. Citie s and states are taking action. Stronger bills are being introduced in Congress all the time. The latest is HJRes 100. Rallies were just held in over 100 towns and cities. Join this movement: http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5236
5. They're raising military spending and calling it “cuts.” The supposed cuts in all the headlines are cuts to dream budgets, leaving actual increases. Small but real cuts would result from following the law after the Super Committee's failure (remember them?). But bills in both houses would block all actual cuts to the military, and President Obama agrees with that agenda. This will mean severe cuts to education, transportation, and — as Obama indicated in his State of the Union speech — to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. http://warisacrime.org/node/60747
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6. New classic book on peace just out. An amazing new book that you will treasure has just been published. It is first-person stories of war and peace and activism from all over the world, from victims, refugees, journalists, lawyers, and participants in numerous wars. Every story is personal and moving. There is not a drop of corporate media disinterestedness in the book. You may know some of the authors and now you'll know them better. It's 600 pages but you'll be sorry when you reach the end. http://www.amazon.com/Why-Peace-Marc-Guttman/dp/0984980202
7. Guess who says the anthrax attacks were pinned on the wrong guy (again)? The Department of Justice. Anybody else, and Obama would have charged them with “espionage”. http://warisacrime.org/node/60765
8. We're re-occupying the Philippines, by jingo! On the plus side, we have not yet been told that this will benefit “our little brown brothers” (whether they like it or not). http://warisacrime.org/node/60746
9. Prevent Fukushima in Vermont. A Fukushima-style nuclear power plant in Vermont legally must shut down, but in reality is up and running. We can close it. http://warisacrime.org/node/60745
11. Torture lawyer John Yoo badly loses debate. Professor Yoo agreed to debate a sane person, with predictable but still satisfying result: http://warisacrime.org/node/60738
14. Occupy Spring! The National Occupation of Washington DC starts on March 30, 2012. http://nowdc.org
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15. No Immunity for Mortgage Fraudsters! The Obama Administration has been working on a mortgage fraud settlement that itself amounts to fraud, but attorneys general in several states are pushing back. Obama's speeches stress fairness and equality, but a settlement granting immunity to big banks is not fair. Robosigning and other fraudulent practices are ongoing. The White House is offering the banks a plea bargain in the middle of a crime spree. Attorneys general in Delaware, New York, Massachusetts, California, and other states are pushing in the right direction. Tell leading state attorneys general not to settle for less than an adequate settlement. http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=5322
While most people weren’t looking, America’s controversial detention facility at Guantanamo Bay turned ten years old a few weeks ago; for some reason, the President didn’t mention this during the State of the Union. I used the occasion of Guantanamo’s birthday party in Washington, D.C. to meet, and to arrange an interview with, retired Air Force Col. Morris Davis, once the Chief Prosecutor of the Guantanamo military commissions, and now one of the most outspoken critics of our nation’s entire “indefinite detention” regime. The interview is here (and cross-posted at the talking dog blog.)
Col. Morris Davis (USAF, Ret.) is a professor at the Howard University School of Law. From 2005 until 2007, Col. Davis was the Chief Prosecutor for the Guantanamo Bay military commissions. He resigned from that post in 2007 in protest of political interference in prosecutorial functions. He retired from active military service in 2008 and became the head of the Foreign Affairs, Defense and Trade Division in the Congressional Research Service. He served in that post until January 2010, when he was terminated after publishing op-ed articles critical of Guantanamo and war on terror policies.
On January 12, 2012, I had the privilege of interviewing Col. Davis by telephone. What follows are my interview notes, as corrected by Col. Davis.
Killing Obama – Andrew Adler in an Emotional Video Apology
Update: Atlanta Jewish Times Editor Andrew Adler – a Victim of Israeli Iran Threat Hype – Classic Game Theory Warfare on Steroids
Jim W. Dean
Veterans Today, 24 January 2012
Atlanta Interfaith Broadcasters got an exclusive interview with Andrew Adler, below. They are a long time non profit broadcast booster to the Atlanta faith community, providing a pooled resource platform. VT is happy to offer you a front row seat to hear his story.
What you are about to view is a classic broken man…with no acting going on. Those of us who have seen this numerous times, you can always tell. So I think now that we have a true blue believer here that got wound up a little too tight. More on that later.
Please pay close attention to the part where he let says that in an interview show he had with the Deputy Israeli General Consul for the Southeast, that he was upset by her description of the dire threat that Israel was living under…the 15,000 rockets.
This is pure Israeli-Iran threat hype, of course. It should be prosecutable under the Nuremberg precedents, ‘waging an offensive war’, and all of us here look forward to the day where we can watch the trials online.
We have written many times that Iran is of no offensive threat to the U.S. or Israel, with their military totally deployed in a defensive mode which it has to be from the threat of Israel’s Weapons of Mass Destruction umbrella.
Phi Beta Iota: Fascinating at multiple levels, including the exploration of current best-selling book in Israel, Israeli political crime families, and more.
Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State
by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin
Little, Brown, 296 pp., $27.99
Intelligence and US Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform
by Paul R. Pillar
Columbia University Press, 413 pp., $29.50
Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America’s Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda
by Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker
Times Books, 324 pp., $27.00
What is the American intelligence bureaucracy good for? The question is difficult to ask in a serious way in Washington because it risks raising the hackles of career intelligence professionals and their political sponsors at a time when spy agencies remain under pressure to combat resilient if diminished international terrorist groups and to monitor and check Iran’s nuclear program, among other challenges. Yet a serious, transparent review of the intelligence system’s strengths and limitations is overdue.
The past decade has witnessed one of the most egregious misuses of intelligence in American history—the Bush administration’s distortion of information about Saddam Hussein’s terrorist ties and unconventional weapons, in order to justify the invasion of Iraq. It has also seen a surge of paramilitary activity and covert action that has included the operation of secret prisons, the use of torture, and targeted killing. The Obama administration ended officially sanctioned torture, but it has refused to allow official inquiries into how it occurred, and the administration has increased the number of covert, unacknowledged targeted killings through the use of armed, unmanned aerial drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
In all, a president who might have challenged the American intelligence bureaucracy and given it a new direction has instead maintained and even expanded what he inherited. Nor has Congress reviewed the hasty organizational reforms it enacted after September 11 or reckoned in depth with the problems exposed by the Iraq disaster. The vital questions that seemed to be begged after the Bush era—about the intelligence system’s scope, effectiveness, costs, outsourcing, legal justifications, and vulnerability to politicization—have remained largely unaddressed.
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After September 11, newspaper Op-Ed pages were full of recommendations for radical departures in American intelligence, changes that might place new emphasis on lean and adaptable operations. There was much talk of a long-term development of “human sources of information”; of the need for risk-taking and the bold penetration of what are known in the intelligence agencies as “denied areas,” such as Iran and North Korea. Some of that ambition has been fulfilled; it is difficult to measure how much, since so much of the detail of post–September 11 covert action and intelligence collection remains secret.
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What is plain, nonetheless, is that the larger story of the American intelligence system is one of continuity. The bureaucracy has defended itself from outside investigation and oversight and has followed many of the trajectories set during the Eisenhower years. The relative strengths of tactical American intelligence tradecraft today include innovative technology, vacuum cleaner–like collection of electronic data worldwide, computer algorithms that sort valuable information from noise, and the bludgeoning effects on adversaries of huge if wasteful spending. These methods look very similar to those of the anti-Soviet intelligence system. The bureaucracy’s weaknesses—inefficiency, ignorance of local cultures, revolving doors, self-perpetuation, vulnerability to political pressure, and an overall lack of accountability—are deeply familiar, too.
Phi Beta Iota: The New York Review of Books is retarded. Search for the article to read the full piece without their demand for registration. We note with interest that most of these themes were clearly addressed by Robert Steele in ON INTELLIGENCE: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World (AFCEA, 2000), but “blacked out” by the sycophantic media including Steve Coll and David Ignatius. It is a rare day when a mainstream media person gets this real–Mr. Coll now administers the New America Foundation, a front for the Obama Administration that receives taxpayer funding it has not earned. This sudden “conversion” by Mr. Coll may be a preamble to a very large but still insufficient and ineffective cut of secret intelligence just prior to the election. Neither Mr. Coll nor the Obama Administration are interested in intelligence with integrity–only profiteering from the commonwealth while flim-flaming the public with theatrics.
Read this at least three times. This is a talking points memorandum for the Empire cabal, which is now ready to take on the white guys (including the white guys with guns). They believe blacks and hispanics are cowed, “weed and seed” has been a success story (in their view). This is a subtle hit job that sets the stage for treating white guys as failures who lost their cultural compass and must now be treated with the same federalization of state and local force and ultimate incarceration that has been used so extensively on blacks.
The Rodney King riots were the beginning of the breakdown of US Government legitimacy in the eyes of its own public. The economy is being juiced and the Republicans are playing along with the fiction that the economy is getting better. It is not. Unemployment is at 22.4% and 2013 is going to be catastrophic. Now imagine the Rodney King riots, this time with while guys who are armed to the teeth and very very pissed off, with nothing to lose and everything to gain from a populist revolution.
The ideal of an ‘American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
Charles Murray
Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2012
EXTRACT
Over the past 50 years, that common civic culture has unraveled. We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America's core cultural institutions.
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As I've argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.
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Meanwhile, the formation of the new upper class has been driven by forces that are nobody's fault and resist manipulation. The economic value of brains in the marketplace will continue to increase no matter what, and the most successful of each generation will tend to marry each other no matter what. As a result, the most successful Americans will continue to trend toward consolidation and isolation as a class. Changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy won't make a difference. Increasing scholarships for working-class children won't make a difference.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010” (Crown Forum) will be published on Jan. 31.
Phi Beta Iota: The eight stages of genocide established by Dr. Greg Stanton are as follows: 1) Classification (us versus them); 2) Symbolization (codewords–e.g bums); 3) Dehumanization (equated with animals, eugenics applies); 4) Organization (federalization of state and local police, opening of the Halliburton-build civil disturbance camps now ready for use); 5) Polarization (attack all independent and centrist movements and leaders); 6) Preparation (use NDAA to incarcerate without due process those who object to the nazification of the USA); 7) Extermination (through a mix of precision kills and “accidental” epidemics, gut the white middle class now diving into poverty); 8) Denial (already taking place at Davos 2012 – capitalism failed, not the elite).
