Author: Dave LIndorff

New York — The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some hidden hands in Washington. the same can be said of the brutal tactics used.

If Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland, or Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York, had been genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of the people in the encampments in their cities, they would not have dispatched police suited up in riot gear and armed with pepper spray and big clubs into the camps in the dead of night, as each did, and as other mayors are doing. They would not have used tear gas and guns firing projectiles like so called “bean bags” and rubber coated bullets, as police in Oakland reportedly did on several occasions — weapons that can cause severe injury and even death on occasion, especially when fired at close range.

They would not have stormed encampments that are known to have pregnant women, children and even babies living in them.

Rather, they would have come in during broad daylight, peacefully, and accompanied by health inspectors and other personnel who could to try to help solve any problems.

In Bloomberg’s case, if he really cared about the safety and well-being of the protesters, he would have long ago had the city set up a bank of port-a-potties near Zuccotti Park, so protesters could relieve themselves without having to foul the streets. And he would certainly not have barred demonstrators from setting up tents, forcing people, in increasingly harsh weather, including one heavy unseasonal snowstorm, to survive under plastic tarps laid on the cold flagstones over their sleeping bags.
Zuccotti Park after Tuesday's police assault, and Wall Street two mornings later, as OWS responds to the eviction

When it comes to mainstream press reports about a possible Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, it’s time to check the bullshit detector.
Overload!

Corporate media reports are claiming that the Pentagon and the White House are “worried” or “concerned” that the Israeli government may decide to attack Iran, and that the US is “trying to learn” what Israel’s real intentions are: is there a serious plan to attack or is this all just an effort to blackmail the US into taking stronger measures against Iran?

As CNN put it in a Nov. 4 report:
 

The United States has become increasingly concerned Israel could be preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear program, a senior U.S. military official told CNN on Friday.

The U.S. military and intelligence community in recent weeks have stepped up “watchfulness” of both Iran and Israel, according to the senior U.S. military official and a second military official familiar with the U.S. actions.  Asked if the Pentagon was concerned about an attack, the senior military official replied “absolutely.” Both officials declined to be identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the matter.
 

Bzzzzzzzzzzz!

Oops! The Bullshit detector just went off.

Our tax dollars at work: Israel's Air Force can only contemplate attacking Iran thanks to F-15s and to F-16s like these above built and paid for by the US

The real story of the Penn State child abuse scandal and coverup is not Joe Paterno or Penn State, or even the abuse of children, as vile as what happened to them is. What it’s about it the lack of basic freedom for workers in the United State of America to speak out.

On paper, we have one of the freest societies in the world. The First Amendment to the Constitution would appear to be pretty damned unequivocal, when it states:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

And yet, there are all kinds of laws that abridge freedom of speech and the right peaceably to assemble, as well as the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

We’ve all been witness lately to how municipal authorities, no doubt under pressure from the bankers and from the central government’s police and political authorities, have been “abridging,” with the aid of police wielding clubs, pepper spray and tear gas canisters, the supposed freedom of occupy movement activists to peaceably assemble.

What Penn State has done is expose an even bigger problem: the lack of freedom for workers to speak up or to petition for redress of grievances.
Free Speech stops at the workplace door in America, and we all pay the price

What a devilishly sneaky guy that Jose Danial Ortega Saavedra is!

Why this president of Nicaragua, and former leader of the Sandinista rebels in their successful 1979 overthrow of U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, in order to win re-election this fall, as he appears to have done, according to the New York Times, “shrewdly adopted policies aimed at pleasing his base of poor and working-class Nicaraguans, including supplying them with government-donated food”!

Why of all the nerve! What a crook and a scheister! Imagine catering to the needs of the poor in order to win an election. How low can a politician stoop?

Except that, wait a minute. Isn’t that what politicians are supposed to do: to adopt policies aimed at pleasing their base?
Daniel Ortega allegedly helped the poor in order to win votes, and re-election to the presidency of Nicaragua

Once again we got a cheery report from most of the media about employers hiring, albeit “not enough,” and about the jobless rate falling, albeit “it’s still too high.”

The proximate cause of this latest round of propaganda from the corporate media is the latest monthly jobless figure reported out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which said that employers had added 80,000 net new jobs (actually they found that private sector employers had added 104,000 jobs while public agency employers had pink-slipped 24,000 people), and that the official unemployment rate was 9.0 percent, just a notch lower than last month’s 9.1 percent figure.

The Associated Press, which is now the de facto national desk for the eviscerated national newsmedia, trumpeted these anemic results with a headline reading: Employers add 80K jobs, Rate dips to 9.0 pct. This was followed by an upbeat lead, credited to AP Economics Writer Christopher S. Rugaber (who surely should know better if he’s an economics specialist) that read: “WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. jobs crisis may be easing slightly on the strength of a fourth straight month of modest hiring and a dip in the unemployment rate.”

Only it’s not that simple. For one thing, economists agree that the economy would have to be adding 100,000 jobs a month just to keep up with the number of people who are entering the labor force, and double that to make any real progress towards lowering the jobless number, so 80,000 jobs is really going backwards. For another, most of the jobs being created are low-paying and often temporary, which is not going to do much if anything to boost consumer spending, which accounts for almost three-quarters of Gross Domestic Product in the hollowed-out US economy. (In fairness to Rugaber, a day later he wrote a better, less rosy piece, in which he pointed out that among the country’s 14 million officially jobless, the percentage receiving unemployment benefits has fallen from 75% last year to just 48% this year, because so many people have been out of work for more than a year–a third of all those unemployed–that their benefit checks have run out. That gives a hint about how serious the joblessness really is, though it ignores the reality that only half of those who lose their jobs even qualify for unemployment benefits in the first place.)

Credit goes to Yahoo! News, which at least acknowledged right away that these latest stats from the BLS mean things are basically bad, not good news. In this dispatch, headlined October Jobs Report: Deja Vu All Over Again, reporter Daniel Gross correctly called attention to the fact that the public sector was undermining the meager job gains made by the private sector, as well as the fact that the decline in the jobless figure is not the result of the new jobs, but of more people just giving up looking for non-existant jobs and being dropped from the statistics.
Real unemployment is around 23%, not the official BLS figure of 9.0% (Courtesy of Shadow Stats)

Shanghai — I was talking yesterday with the chief financial officer of a US-based drug firm that operates here in China, producing for the Chinese market, and got an up-close look at how bad things are for what used to be called the Almighty Dollar.

The company in question, a joint venture between a very profitable U.S. drug company and a local Chinese company, is quite profitable itself.

The guy was explaining to me that his firm needed to add another factory, because the one they had was running full-tilt and couldn’t keep up with demand. That might sound like a simple problem, and one that most enterprises would be happy to confront, but the shrinking US dollar, and concerns in China about inflation, complicate things.

You would think that it would be a simple matter of the parent company’s sending over the $50 million or so that it would cost to build the new plant and that would be that, but it turns out that the dollar is falling so fast against the Renminbi (RMB), the Chinese local currency, that no contractors or other vendors necessary for setting up a new facility are willing to accept it as payment. That means the company has to try and come up with the construction costs in local currency.

I won’t go into the arcane machinations that involves, except to say that Chinese financial authorities and the country’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), aren’t letting local banks or foreign-owned banks with offices in China lend money without going through a tough approval process, the outcome of which is iffy, and they are setting interest rates at 6.5% for those loans they do approve, which is a pretty stiff rate to have to live with. So there are no easy options.

The important point is that the dollar is being viewed here in China the way people in the U.S. have long viewed Mexican pesos… or Chinese RMB.
The dollar doesn't buy as many RMB as it used to, and now nobody even wants it in China

With Mumia Abu-Jamal’s sentence of death now formally vacated, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week not to consider an appeal by the Philadelphia District Attorney of a Third Circuit Court panel’s ruling that that sentence had been unconstitutional thanks to flawed jury instructions from the trial judge and a flawed jury ballot form, many of those who have long called for his execution are now saying, fine, let him rot in prison for the rest of his life.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, the leading newspaper in his hometown of Philadelphia, in more genteel language, said essentially the same thing in an unsigned October 13 editorial, opining that with the death penalty vacated, the default sentence of life in prison without parole was “appropriate” and “in the best interest of justice.”

The editorial urged DA Seth Williams not to exercise his right within the next 180 days to seek to obtain a new death sentence by asking for a new jury trial on the penalty only. The paper made this plea not because the editors felt such an effort to re-sentence him would be unseemly, but because of the cost to the struggling city of Philadelphia.

But hold on here. Putting aside for a moment the matter of whether Abu-Jamal was even fairly convicted in a trial that was viewed as a shameful farce at the time in 1982 even by the editors of the Inquirer, is it really “in the best interest of justice” or in any way “appropriate” for Abu-Jamal to simply be switched over from a death sentence to a sentence of life in prison without parole, now that, as the Inquirer correctly noted in its editorial, “four federal judges have ruled that Abu-Jamal’s 1982 death sentence was unconstitutional,” and that “he was denied a fair sentencing at his original trial.”

No. It is manifestly not just or appropriate!
Abu-Jamal no longer has a death sentence, but remains in solitary on death row thanks to a vengeful, or gutless, DA and supine judges

Philadelphia — Common Terry was in a buoyant mood as he marched along Market Street Saturday afternoon along with a couple hundred activists who, following a rally outside the Liberty Bell pavilion, headed over to Philadelphia’s ornate City Hall to join the thousand or so occupiers camped out there.

“We’ve been occupying places for a long time,” said the laid off part-time teacher from Oakland, California. “University administration buildings, parks in Berkeley, nuclear plants. And now we’re occupying the centers of cities!”

Terry, who says he has been shuttling back and forth between the occupations in Philadelphia and New York, said he had purchased a one-month $60 Trailpass on Greyhound and was planning to attend a number of other occupation sites around the country.

The movement is clearly growing in size, and impact.

Gathering at Independence Mall before march to Occupy Philadelphia at City Hall (Photos: John Grant)

“This is cool. It’s a good thing they’re doing. Living democracy in action,” said two tourists outside the Constitution Center, as demonstrators marched past carrying signs saying “Hands of my Security and Medicare!” and “Tax the Rich!” and chanting “Banks got bailouts! We got sold out!”

A second couple, Christie and Billy Leetch, down from Boston, said they were happy to see the occupation happening in Philadelphia. “The one in Boston was violently attacked by the police a few days ago,” said Christie. “It was really disgusting, watching them arresting peacefully demonstrating veterans.”

“I agree with the message, and with the civil unrest,” said her husband. “It’s the only way to effect change without picking up guns.”

Marchers head across Market Street toward City Hall accompanied by PPD Strike Force

While the demonstration at Independence Mall was underway, a phalanx of Philadelphia Police, mounted on bikes and wearing jackets that said “Police Strike Force,” waited in a line along the 6th Street Boundary, looking ready to roll out and bang heads. It was a strikingly aggressive image juxtaposed to the completely peaceful crowd assembled across the street from them, and seemed wholly inappropriate. The crowd ignored the biker cops.

Here’s a prediction: Seth Williams, the district attorney of Philadelphia, will decide not to seek to reimpose the death penalty on Mumia Abu-Jamal, the world-famous journalist, former Black Panther and condemned prisoner who has spent the last almost 30 years of his life on Pennsylvania’s overcrowded death row.

The choice belongs to Williams, now that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided, today, on its second time around dealing with the issue, not to overturn the decision of a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which had, on orders of the Supreme Court, reheard, reconsidered and reaffirmed its earlier decision upholding the tossing out of Abu-Jamal’s death sentence by a lower federal district court.

For years since the dramatic 2001 decision by Federal District Judge William Yohn overturning Abu-Jamal’s death sentence on grounds that the trial judge’s instructions to the jury had been faulty and that the jury verdict form was dangerously misleading, Abu-Jamal has remained stuck in brutal solitary confinement at SCI-Green. That’s the super-max facility that houses Pennsylvania’s condemned prisoners, where Abu-Jamal and the others who are actually facing death are denied any human contact either with each other or with close relatives and friends (visits are conducted through heavy bullet-proof plexiglass, with the inmate in chains, for no good reason beyond simple gratuitous cruelty, since escape is impossible). He was kept there for the last decade through the machinations of a vindictive DA’s office, which argued that as long as the lifting of his death sentence was on appeal, he should have to stay put as if he were facing imminent death.

There remains no reason or lame excuse to keep him in that hell hole now, and he should be immediately moved out.

The only way he could face a death penalty at this point would be if the DA, within the next 180 days, were to order up a new trial on the penalty phase of his case, with a new jury hearing arguments for and against sentencing Abu-Jamal to death all over again for the crime he was convicted of back in 1982: the shooting death of white Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner. (There is no easy avenue for appeal of Abu-Jamal’s conviction at this point, as all his habeas claims of constitutional violations and trial errors have been rejected by the highest federal courts.)

Already, the wheels are turning against a penalty retrial.

Film footage of the shooting scene from a local Philadelphia TV news archive. Note the absence of any taxi parked behind Faulkner’s squad car (courtesy Ted Passon).