A federal judge is set to hear arguments on Monday in a lawsuit
challenging an alleged secret Obama administration plan to use lethal
force against an American-born Islamic cleric hiding in Yemen.
In July, US authorities listed al-Awlaki as a “specially designated global terrorist.” According to press reports, he is on a US government “kill list.”
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of al-Awlaki’s father by the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges the government’s authority to carry out the
intentional killing.
“Net neutrality” and “freedom to connect” might be loaded or vague terminologies; the label “Open Internet” is clearer, more effective, no way misleading. A group of Internet experts and pioneers submitted a paper to the FCC that defines the Open Internet and explains how it differs from networks that are dedicated to specialized services, and why that distinction is imortant. It’s a general purpose network for all, and can’t be appreciated (or properly regulated) unless this point and its implications are well understood. I signed on (late) to the paper, which is freely available at Scribd, and which is worth reading and disseminating even among people who don’t completely get it. I think the meaning and relevance of the distinction will sink in, even with those who don’t have deep knowledge of the Internet and, more generally, computer networking. The key point is that “the Internet should be delineated from specialized services specifically based on whether network providers treat the transmission of packets in special ways according to the applications those packets support. Transmitting packets without regard for application, in a best efforts manner, is at the very core of how the Internet provides a general purpose platform that is open and conducive to innovation by all end users.”
Press release:
Numerous Internet and technology leaders issued a joint statement last night encouraging the FCC to expand its recent analysis of open Internet policy in a newly fruitful direction.
In the statement, they commend the agency’s recent request for input on “Two Underdeveloped Issues in the Open Internet Proceeding” for its making possible greater recognition of the nature and benefits of the open Internet — in particular, as compared to “specialized services.” In response to the FCC’s request, their submission illustrates how this distinction dispels misconceptions and helps bring about more constructive insight and understanding in the “net neutrality” policy debate.
Longtime network and computer architecture expert David Reed comments in a special blog posting: “It is historic and critical [to] finally recognize the existence of ‘the Open Internet’ as a living entity that is distinct from all of the services and the Bureaus, all of the underlying technologies, and all of the services into which the FCC historically has partitioned little fiefdoms of control.”
Another signer, John Furrier of SiliconANGLE, has publicized the statement, stating “the future Internet needs to remain open in order to preserve entrepreneurship and innovation.”
The statement’s signers are listed below. Please reply to me, Seth Johnson (seth.p.johnson@gmail.com), to request contact information for those available for comment.
“THE SECRET LIFE OF BEEF” REVEALS BEEF’S ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS
INFORM launches third video in “The Secret Life” series
(New York City) INFORM, Inc., the educational and advocacy nonprofit that raises environmental consciousness through visual media, has just launched “The Secret Life of Beef,” an engaging and enlightening six-minute video. The video increases awareness about the environmental impacts of industrial beef production, illustrates how it contributes to global warming, and offers more sustainable alternatives.
Americans consume over twenty-eight billion pounds of beef a year, one of the highest per capita rates in the world, yet few beef eaters are aware of the connection between their dietary choices and the environmental damage caused by beef production.
Livestock production produces one-fifth of all global greenhouse gases, more than all transportation sources combined
It takes seven pounds of grain and 2,500 gallons of water to produce one pound of hamburger
Seventy percent of all antibiotic use in the U.S. is used in livestock production
“The Secret Life of Beef” tells its story through academic experts, grass-fed beef farmers, chefs, sustainable butchers, educators, and restaurant owners. It also offers more eco-friendly alternatives to the heavy meat consuming habits of most Americans—from going meatless one day a week to purchasing grass-fed beef.
If every American went meatless one day a week, it would be equivalent to taking eight million cars off the road.
The best way to reduce your carbon footprint is to reduce your overall beef consumption.
The Federal Reserve will pump $600 billion more into the US economy and keep interest rates at historical low levels. The short-term impact of the Fed’s move, known as quantitative easing, has been a jump in stock prices across the globe. Many nations, however, have accused the United States of waging a currency war by devaluing the dollar. We speak to former Wall Street economist and University of Missouri professor Michael Hudson. “The object of warfare is to take over a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them,” Hudson says. “In the past, that used to be done militarily by invading them. But today you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has done.” [includes rush transcript]
Amazon Page -- New Edition (2003)
QUOTE from the Introduction: “The last time there were a series of devaluations like this it led to WW II.”
QUOTE from the TV Interview: “A legalized way for Wall Street to loot other Central Banks.”
QUOTE from the TV Interview: “In Europe it is illegal for the Central Bank to finance government debt.”
Phi Beta Iota: This interview, viewed in its entirety, destroys the myth of Barack Obama and clarifies with stunning detail the degree to which the Obama Administration is blocking all forms of relief for the public at the state level at the same time that he is assuring that the Chinese yuan will become the global reserve currency. We anticipate all sales of anything to US currency to be blocked by other countries, and we hope that US Governors will start nullifying federal interference with justice at the state level.
John le Carré, the former British spy turned spy novelist, has some grave words for Tony Blair. More than seven years after the invasion of Iraq, the former British prime minister, now out of office and touring the world pushing his political memoir, is encountering serious protests at his book signings.
“I can’t understand that Blair has an afterlife at all. It seems to me that any politician who takes his country to war under false pretenses has committed the ultimate sin,” he told me when I sat down with le Carré recently in London. “We’ve caused irreparable damage in the Middle East. I think we shall pay for it for a long time.”
In my last Counterpunch essay, “How Obama's Initial Personnel Decisions Hardwired the Wipeout” I organized my argument around verbiage describing how Obama “fatal move” to the middle,” leaving the misleading impression that his connection to the middle occurred after the election. This was sloppy wording and in retrospect it is clear to me that impression did not even reflect what I was trying to say. “Irrevocable” would have been a better modifier than “fatal.” And the word “move” was more related to the perceptions of the people whose enthusiasm he unleashed during the campaign, not Obama's political proclivities.
Obama has always been a center-right politician tightly connected to ruling oligarchs in the US. I have been concerned about this connection with the oligarchy since December 2007, when I became aware of the people who were advising him on defense, foreign policy, and treasury matters. I publicly expressed concerns about his defense advisors in July 2008 and all of them on 5 November 2008, (see last paragraph here) the day after he was elected. “Hardwiring the Wipeout” was basically a first-cut bookend to the 5 November piece (what I called the outer layer of the onion).
Lest you think I am quibbling about what the meaning of “is” is, for the record, I agree with the critical comments (attached below) from my good friend Pierre Sprey, who has taken the trouble to give an incisive correction to my sloppy wording, and which he has graciously agreed to let me forward. Think of this as a roadmap for probing into the second and more rancid layer of the onion.
——————————- [Sprey's Comment]————————
Pierre Sprey
Chuck,
Superb analysis of why the voters tossed out Bush and his cohorts, how Obama generated such strong support and, two years later, why many of those supporters felt betrayed enough to stay home or to vote Republican. The article is most certainly needed and timely to fend off the tsunami of obfuscation that both the Republican and Democratic pundits are about to unleash.
On the other hand, I view your chronology of Obama's (and the Democratic Party's) “move to the middle” a bit differently–and our differences have serious implications for judging Obama's character, his decision-making and the futility of expecting change in anything but his rhetoric:
1. I see no evidence that there's been any change or “move” in substantive actions and stated policies going from Senator Obama to Candidate Obama to President Obama. Needless to say, over this entire time most of his policy “positions” were (and are) rhetoric cleverly crafted to avoid any specific position at all.
2. Given that early financial backers of Obama in Chicago politics were the Crown family (General Dynamics and super-Zionists) and the Pritzker family (credit business, Goldman Sachs allies and super-Zionists), I'd say it's likely that Obama's commitment to the MICC, to Wall Street and to Israel predated his run for the Senate.
In trying to understand why the Democrats just crashed and burned, I think the first layer in peeling the onion takes the form of an admission to two crucial mistakes made by Obama before he took office. He campaigned brilliantly on a vague theme of change. In so doing, he unleashed a hornet's nest of intense expectations that would have been hard to fulfill in the best of circumstances, but Obama's personnel decisions made during the transition period guaranteed the worst of circumstances.
Two big reasons underpinned the power of his appeal and placed his uplifting narrative into sharp contrast with the visceral disgust felt toward Bush by the mass of Obama's supporters in the Democratic party and Independents.
A sense of unfair economic hardship embodied in the widespread feelings of insecurity and anger that emanated from the combined effects of stagnating living standards, the continuing loss of jobs due to deindustrialization, and the systematic transfer of wealth from the middle to the upper classes. The anger reached a bi-partisan critical mass with the onset of a massive middle-class bloodletting in the Great Recession, while the wealthy perpetrators of the bloodletting were bailed out by and even profited from the Bush Administration's so-called counter-recessionary policies.
Growing disgust with Bush's lawless policy of unilateral militarism and never ending war, reflected in the increasingly costly, unfocused wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere (and perhaps augmented by a vague feeling of fear fatigue, reflecting a sense that it was time to end the politics of fear and return to less abnormal state of affairs).
Both Hillary Clinton in the primaries or John McCain in the general election danced to Obama's music of change, but neither was able (or wanted?) to smoke out how Candidate Obama's planned to change directions. In effect, their failure to do so, freed President Obama from having to live within tight policy constraints imposed by specific campaign promises. This opened the door toward a cynical “move to the middle” via a series of timid compromises and accommodations, justified by the shopworn theory that his most committed supporters had nowhere else to go. That tired justification may play well to the self-referencing political class in Versailles on the Potomac, but Obama's supporters did have places to go: the hard core base could simply stay home, and independents like to switch sides.
Obama's fatal move to middle began immediately after his election when he chose to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by picking members of the oligarchical establishment who helped to create and benefitted from the economic and national security messes he inherited — i.e., Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Robert Gates, and Hillary Clinton, plus the plethora of 2nd tier policy wonks and wannabes who came out the Clinton economic and national security apparat in waiting, eg, the “good war mafia” of precision-strike/coercive diplomacy dilettantes in defense, like Michele Flournoy, whose main achievement to date has been to completely gomer up the Quadrennial Defense Review.
These personnel decisions set the stage for a continuation of the Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Bush business-as-usual under a kinder and gentler face, taking the forms of policies that (1) continue the redistributive economic policies to favor the people who caused the meltdown, albeit softened by a highly visible albeit insufficient stimulus policy and (2) continue shoveling money into the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex via (a) an escalation of war policy — e.g., by embracing the idea of the AFPAK theater of operations — under the guise of a phony distinction between expanding a good war against terrorism in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) while ending the bad war in Iraq (which was merely in temporary remission, as the recent escalation of murderous events in Baghdad and Anbar Province show) and (b) increased funding of an outdated cold-war inspired weapons modernization program that does not modernize a shrinking, aging force structure.
