Author: Dave LIndorff

Leave it to a soccer hero to kickstart some serious political action.

Eric Cantona, a French soccer star who finished his playing career at Manchester United and went into acting, has sparked a European, and perhaps a global uprising against the global banking industry by calling on people everywhere to simply take their money and run away from the big banks on December 7.

Cantona, in a television interview about his career, got political in a hurry, saying that demonstrations such as those that occurred last month across France in opposition to cuts in that country’s retirement program, were meaningless and “accomplish nothing except to further the aims of the oppressors.” He called on those same protesters, and on people everywhere, to take “effective action” by withdrawing all their savings from the banks.

His challenge has caught fire across Europe, where the action is being coordinated on Facebook and via a website called Bankrun 2010. More recently, this campaign has made its way across the Atlantic to America, where soccer’s not such a big game, and where most of the economic protest action has been focussed on the reactionary anti-tax Tea Party crowd. But even here in the US, the idea of sticking it to the big banks has begun to resonate, with a website called Stopbank USA calling for a day of action by Americans on December 7.

On December 7, make it look like this at B of A, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase

Cleck here for the first half of a two-part interview of Dave Lindorff by Dori Smith, host of “Talk Show Nation,” a public affairs program recorded at WHUS in Storrs, Connecticut and broadcast on Nov. 17, and syndicated on Pacifica Radio. The second half of the interview will be broadcast next week.
"Talk Radio Nation" is syndicated on the Pacific Radio network

Is it news when police photograph and videotape demonstrations?

Apparently for American editors and reporters, making that news judgement depends on where the demonstration occurs and what nationality the police are.

When a hundred artists gathered outside a Beijing courtroom in mid-November to protest the jailing of artist Wu Yuren, who had earlier been beaten by police and jailed because he had gone to a police station to file a complaint against a landlord, the New York Times ran an article by reporter Andrew Jacobs which pointedly noted that police officers had videotaped the crowd, and then quoted a demonstrator, artist Dou Bu, as saying, “I was scared to come out here today, but you have to face your fears.”

But a week earlier, when several hundred backers of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a black journalist on Pennsylvania’s death row for the killing of a police officer, demonstrated in front of a Third Circuit federal court building in Philadelphia, where a three-judge panel was rehearing an argument on his sentence, and local police not only videotaped the officially sanctioned rally, but also aggressively photographed and taped a group of journalists waiting to be allowed into the courtroom early, there was no mention of their action in any media, local or national.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, God must love veterans; He makes so many of them.

We just finished “celebrating” Veteran’s Day earlier this month, complete with the usual parades and the show of flags, but it’s worth remembering that Nov. 11 wasn’t always a day for blindly glorifying the military.

When November 11 was initially established as a US holiday, it was done by an Act of Congress to commemorate the cease-fire established on the Western front between the forces of Germany and those of the French, British and Americans. The name of the holiday–Remembrance Day in the UK and Commonwealth countries, Armistice Day in the US–was only changed in America to Veterans Day after the Korean War, when the US was well on the way to being transformed into a permanent war machine.

World War I dead litter a road

The three-decades-long murder case of Philadelphia journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has sat in solitary in a cramped cell on Pennsylvania’s death row for 28 years fighting his conviction and a concerted campaign by the national police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, to execute him, was back in court Tuesday, with a three-judge federal Appeals Court panel reconsidering its 2008 decision backing the vacating of his death sentence, on orders of the US Supreme Court.

Many Americans simply assume that the government and politicians lie when they are talking about things like cutting taxes, or eliminating waste. But somehow, we tend to believe official government reports about things like economic “growth” or unemployment rates, or even cost-of-living increases.

The truth, sadly, is that the government is lying about these things too.

Take jobs and unemployment. Right after the election, the Obama administration’s Bureau of Labor Statistics proudly trumpeted that the economy had added 151,000 new jobs in October. President Obama, about to head off to India, a land where American jobs go to die, made it sound like maybe the American economy had finally turned a corner. The news led to a jump in the stock market and everyone breathed a sigh of relief, because finally, we had a number that was greater than the 100,000 new jobs that we have been repeatedly told are needed “just to keep pace with the new workers who join the labor force every month.”

The Democrats were blown out of the water on Nov. 2.

But it’s not because of the Tea Party, or because of a resurgent Republican majority.

The Democrats deserved to lose because they have long since abandoned whatever principles they had, and more important, they’ve pissed on their most important supporters–the left, real liberals, African Americans, women, unionized workers, and workers in general. So I say hooray, all those groups have struck back!

Barack Obama set this disaster for the party and his presidency in motion before he was even sworn in as president, by choosing Wall Street hacks as his economic advisers in the midst of the worst economic crisis in 75 years, and by choosing as his key political adviser Rahm Emanuel, who famously called progressive critics “fucking retarded,” and who, when warned that the GM bailout plan would hurt the United Autoworkers members who worked there, also famously said “Fuck the UAW!”
Democrats got clobbered for a good reason

On Canada’s Freedomain Radio, an interview by Stefan Molyneux:

“As the author of The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), I never thought in my lifetime that I would see a president reach the depth of moral decay and depravity of President George W. Bush, but sad to say, our current president, Barack Obama, has managed to do it, and what makes it worse, as a former Constitutional law professor, he knows better.”

So many things have been happening in the news this week–The NPR Williams firing, the latest Wikileaks leak, Bank mortgage fraud, DU weapons fallout in Fallujah, a sane person running for Texas School Board, the deepening crisis of joblessness — I feel I should offer another perspective on them:

A victory for the government in a federal court in New York City Monday marks another slide deeper into Dick Cheney’s “dark side” for the Obama Administration.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgement saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Parwan Prison at Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan: Torture USA