Category: Uncategorized

Nancy Goodman Brinker, a pioneer of “cause marketing”, founded Susan G. Komen For the Cure in 1982, reportedly as the fulfillment of a deathbed promise made to her sister, a victim of breast cancer. In 1994, Brinker founded In Your Corner, Inc., a for-profit company that markets health products and information. In 1998, Brinker sold In Your Corner to AstraZeneca, the third largest pesticide manufacturer in the world (primarily through Syngenta, a giant global agribusiness joint-venture company it owns together with Novartis).

AstraZeneca has had close ties to Brinker for many years. It gave $97,000 to Komen and its affiliates in the first 6 months of 2008 alone, and it has been a big presence at Komen’s Race for the Cure. AstraZeneca is also one of the largest contributors to Breast Cancer Awareness Month. 

The problem here is that pesticides cause breast cancer.

AstraZeneca solves the problem by no longer advertising itself as a pesticide manufacturer.  It is a “life-sciences” company. Ta da! Problem solved! Well, they still manufacture more pesticides than ever (substances that congregate in the sexual glands of mammals causing cancers, birth defects, etc., etc.,) but “life sciences” sounds so reassuring, yes? 

Susan G. Komen has created a lengthy list of risk factors for breast cancer.  Nowhere in this list can you find exposure to toxins, probably the greatest risk factor of all. 

Hey Nancy! Didn’t your sister ask you to cure breast cancer? Was her dying wish, “Please forgive them for killing me, pay yourself half a million dollars a year – and oh by the way please protect those poor pesticide manufacturers. They know not what they do.”

Pesticides like those produced by AstreZeneca and Novartis have been linked to cancer, including breast cancer

It’s a relief to know that President Obama’s “preferred” solution to dealing with disagreements with Iran is diplomacy, as he said yesterday in an interview on NBC TV, but at the same time, it’s profoundly disturbing that he is simultaneously saying that, as an AP report on the interview put it: he would “not take options off the table to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.”

Equally disturbing are the president’s mutually contradictory statements that, on the one hand, he feels that “Any kind of additional military activity inside the Gulf is disruptive and has a big effect on us,” and that on the other, he will “make sure that we work in lockstep” with Israel in dealing with Iran and its nuclear program.

Lockstep? With Israel?

Didn’t the US just send Gen.Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Israel to tell that country’s leaders that the US does not want Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. And wasn’t Israel also told that the US would not support it in any attack on Iran, at least if the US was not warned well in advance? Israel, of course, is continuing to threaten to attack Iran — using the very planes and bombs that the US provides it with. So how exactly is opposing an attack by Israel and having Israel continuously threatening to attack in any way to be construed as working in “lockstep”?

And anyhow, what kind of a country moves in “lockstep” with any other country, except for a puppet regime?

The US does not have a treaty with Israel requiring the US to go to war when Israel goes to war. It doesn’t even have a treaty to go to Israel’s defense if Israel is attacked. There is a treaty like that with Taiwan, but not with Israel. US interests are clearly not congruent with Israeli interests, especially where Iran is concerned (just ask any veteran of the USS Liberty about how congruent US and Israeli policy really is).

There were other problems with the president’s interview on television yesterday too. The biggest one is that his own military chief, Leon Panetta, has stated that the US does not have evidence that the Iranians are building a bomb.

Washington is full of a lot of attack-Iran war talk as are the corporate media, but the public is saying 'No!'

Something very small and yet enormous happened this past week.

On Feb. 2, two women who have been fighting for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, filmmaker/professor Johanna Fernandez and National Lawyers Guild Executive Director Heidi Boghosian, visited Abu-Jamal, as each has done in the past, but this time, because he has been moved off of death row, for the first time since 1995, he was able to greet them with a hug–free of the leg shackles and handcuffs gratuitously attached to him during his visit sessions on death row at SCI Greene prison.

For the first time too, since 1995, there is a photo to record that seemingly mundane and deceptively ordinary-looking event.

Mumia greets visitors Johanna Fernandez and Heidi Boghosian with a hug

Let’s see now. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence who oversees both the FBI and the CIA, is warning that Iran’s leaders have “changed their calculus” and, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “now appear willing to conduct an attack within the US.”

Speaking at a Join Intelligence Committee hearing in Congress, the aptly-named Clapper said that Iranian leaders, “probably including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei” are “now more willing to conduct an attack in the United States as a response to real or perceived actions that threaten the regime.”

Well gee, that sure should come as a shocker.

Officials in the US, from the President on down to the clowns in Congress and campaigning for president , are all (with the notable exception of Rep. Ron Paul), insisting that “nothing is off the table” in confronting what they all keep insisting, with no hard evidence, is Iran’s alleged “program” to produce a nuclear weapon. We know, from reports by journalists like Seymour Hersh and others, that the US is already sponsoring and helping to orchestrate sabotage and terror attacks within Iran. The country’s top nuclear scientists are being killed by sappers on motorbikes, almost certainly working for Mossad, the spy service of America’s client state Israel. Several US aircraft carriers loaded with bombs, bomber aircraft and rack upon rack of cruise missiles, are stationed threateningly off the Iranian coast. And the US is working on boosting the power of its already huge 30,000-lb. conventional bombs which are specifically designed to destroy Iran’s deeply buried nuclear fuel development facilities. The US is also running regular spy flights by stealth plans and drone aircraft (one of which was captured intact recently by the Iranians), over Iran to develop targeting information.

If you were the Iranian government, facing all those threats and actual acts of war against you coming from the country with the most powerful military in the world, you would be completely idiotic and derelict in your duty if you did not start developing a plan to retaliate against a looming attack.

Iran recently captured intact a US spy drone that was allegedly picking targets for a possible US attack on Iran

R&B pioneer Johnny Otis discovered Etta James when she was still a teenager, launching her nearly 60-year career. The two lifelong friends both died last week — just days apart — at the ages of 90 and 73, respectively.

From their first meeting in 1953, the fates of Johnny Otis and Etta James seemed almost magically entwined.

Etta James, 1955 (Michael Ochs photo)

Spunky little Jamesetta Hawkins, then 14 years old, was overheard rehearsing a song with her girl group The Creolettes in a San Francisco hotel bathroom. Outside the door, Otis’ ears perked up. “I knew instantly when I heard Etta sing in that bathroom audition that she would be a star,” Otis said decades later. “I heard the raw talent she possessed before she had developed.”

Johnny Otis – already famous for hits like “Harlem Nocturne,” “Castin’ My Spell on You,” and “Willie and the Hand Jive” – was also known as a radio disc jockey and a keen talent scout. His other discoveries included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Little Richard, Esther Phillips, Sugar Pie De Santo, Jackie Wilson, and Little Willie John. Now his sights were set on Jamesetta.

He’s out!

Credit ‘people power’ for getting internationally known inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal sprung from his apparently punitive, seven-week placement in ‘The Hole.’

For the first time since receiving a controversial death sentence in 1982 for killing a Philadelphia policeman, the widely acclaimed author-activist finds himself in general population, a prison housing status far less restrictive than the solitary confinement of death row.

Inmates in general population have full privileges to visitation, telephone and commissary, along with access to all prison programs and services, all things denied or severely limited to convicts on death row waiting to be killed by the state.

In early December 2011, Pennsylvania Department of Corrections officials, after the federal courts had removed his death penalty and the Philadelphia District Attorney opted not to attempt to re-try the penalty phase in hopes of winning a new death sentence, placed Abu-Jamal in Administrative Custody (a/k/a ‘The Hole’).

Administrative Custody is confinement in a Spartan isolation cell where conditions are more draconian than even death row.

The release of Abu-Jamal from Administrative Custody into general population on Friday, January 27, 2012 followed with a multi-layered protest campaign by his supporters worldwide that included flooding Pennsylvania prison authorities with telephone calls, collecting petitions containing over 5,000 signatures and a complaint filed with United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Public pressure to release Mumia Abu-Jamal from the "Hole" trumped the pressure from those trying to keep torturing him (photo by Linn Washington

The State Department has threatened to withdraw the $1.5 billion it sends every year to Egypt because the Egyptians are holding US citizens connected with pro-democracy groups the Egyptians claim have instigated the Tahrir Square movement.

Specifically, the Egyptian military government prevented a half dozen Americans — including Sam LaHood, director of the US International Republican Institute in Cairo — from leaving the country. LaHood is the son of US Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood. Such entities, some supported by US funding, are notorious for meddling in places like Venezuela. In this case, there is an interest in influencing the turmoil in Egypt.

Before this incident, President Obama warned Egyptian military strongman Field Marshall Mohamed Hussein Tantawi that the upcoming installment of US military aid was contingent on his playing ball with US interests. The snatching of LaHood and the others turned the situation into a diplomatic incident. LaHood was quoted in The New York Times as wondering whether he would be brought to trial for meddling in Egyptian affairs.

“[T]he whole thing is ludicrous,” he said.

That may be true, but even more ludicrous is the failure to provide a similar warning on the other side of the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. That is, according to several recent reports, Israel’s top leaders are making it known they feel a massive air attack on Iran by Israel is a manageable thing — that suggestions such bombing attacks would lead to a major conflagration are all bluff. A Sunday New York Times Magazine article by Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman concludes “Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Why do US leaders threaten to withhold patronage military funds when Egyptian militarists drag their feet on democracy, but not when Israeli militarists seem ready to drag us into World War Three?

Of course, we know the answer to this. Egyptians are backward brown Arabs with a history of living under the thumb of British colonial rule and US imperial hegemony. We know the drill: Bernard Lewis and the failures of Arab modernization. Israel, on the other hand, is just like us, a western garrison state run by a Prime Minister who went to Cheltenham High School just outside of Philadelphia and who likes to mentally link Iranians with Nazi Germany and the holocaust.

By Brazil's Carlos Latuff

With the middle east in upheaval, the fact Israel finds itself a vulnerable fortress state wound so tightly it won’t even budge an inch to recognize obvious Palestinian grievances is a global tragedy. To say it did not have to be this way and that there were other choices from the very beginning is at this late date pointless. That’s the nature of tragedy; decisions are made and one has to live with them.

Say it loud and say it proud: We’re Number 47! We’re Number 47! Boo-yah!

If you want to know why the US — beacon of freedom, land of the First Amendment — is now ranked number 47th (out of 179) in terms of freedom of the press in the annual ranking put out by Reporters Without Borders, below South Africa, Botswana, South Korea and Comoros, and just above Argentina, Romania and Latvia, you could ask Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York and himself owner of a huge news organization, or his Chief of Police Raymond Kelly.

For that matter you could ask the mayors and police chiefs of Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Boston, Philadelphia, or a host of other cities.

Better yet, ask the mayor of Oakland and her police department’s latest gestapo chief, Howard Jordan.

According to Reporters Without Borders, what caused the US to plunge from 20th place last year, up there with Ireland, Germany, Belgium and Japan, down to 47th this year, was the way reporters were treated by police as they tried to cover the Occupy Movement that began last September.

Across the country, police maneuvered to block reporters from covering their brutal crackdown on the Occupy Movement. In a campaign that increasingly appears to have been coordinated from Washington, over the course of a few weeks in late October and through November they swept into encampments from Los Angeles to New York wearing black military-style riot gear in the dead of night to avoid cameras and videocams, waiting until most journalists had gone home to bed before tearing up the tents and firing the tear gas grenades, the rubber bullets and the pepper spray at unarmed, unresisting protesters. Or, when reporters did show up and tried to cover the assaults on peaceful demonstrators, the cops sometimes, as in New York, smashed them and their cameras, or just arrested them.
NY journalist John Farley, cuffed and wearing press credentials, arrested while covering Occupy Wall Street story

I made a mistake.

An article I wrote recently for TCBH about the Pennsylvania prison system’s latest punitive assault on now ex-death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal (unnecessarily continuing his solitary confinement) contained a factual misstatement.

Most journalists consider any inaccuracy an error, regardless of how small.

The Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists calls for admitting “mistakes” and correcting them promptly.

This journalist’s inaccuracy-as-error standard contrasts with court systems, where appellate courts too often dismiss mistakes made during trials by prosecutors and judges without correction by using the court-invented legalistic term: harmless error.

The Abu-Jamal case is fraught with such misconduct and mistakes that appellate courts have not only not corrected, but have allowed to fester and get worse. But you won’t see the courts or the prosecutors ever admitting those things.

In my article, I inaccurately listed Pennsylvania state prison officials as being the prime movers in keeping Abu-Jamal on death row instead of transferring him into general prison population after a federal judge had voided his death sentence in a December 2001 ruling converting that sentence to a life in prison.
Pennsylvania prisoners are put in "the Hole" for their politics, for protesting prison conditions, and for racist reasons

The Iraq war may be over, at least for US troops, but the cover-up of the atrocities committed there by American forces goes on, even in retrospectives about the war. A prime example is reporting on the destroyed city of Fallujah, where some of the heaviest fighting of the war took place.

On March 31, 2004, four armed mercenaries working for the firm then known as Blackwater (now Xe), were captured in Fallujah, Iraq’s third largest city and a hotbed of insurgent strength located in Anbar Province about 40 miles west of Baghdad. Reportedly killed in their vehicle, which was then torched, their charred bodies were strung up on a bridge over the Euphrates River.

Pictures and videos of Fallujah residents mocking the bodies, which, unlike the images of burned and mutilated Iraqi victims of American forces, were broadcast on American television and displayed on the front pages of American newspapers, created a wave of indignation and outrage in the U.S., and led the Bush/Cheney administration and the Pentagon to decide they needed to punish the city of over 300,000.

Accordingly, a few weeks later in April, a brutal assault was launched on Fallujah involving heavy aerial bombardment and house-to-house fighting by thousands of Marines. By the time the US forces had battled their way to the center of the city, the civilian casualties were so high that there were mass demonstrations in cities around the country, including in Baghdad where Iraqi workers held a three-day general strike. Under pressure from its own puppet regime in Baghdad, the U.S. withdrew its troops, leaving insurgents largely in control of the city.

In mid-October, however, the US, embarrassed by what was being portrayed by the Iraqi resistance as an American defeat in April, decided to go in again, this time with larger numbers and much more destructive force.

The plan, as explained by commanding officers interviewed by American reporters at the time, was to trap the insurgents in the city and wipe them out. To achieve that, an announcement was made on Oct. 14 to residents of the city that all civilians should leave. The Marines, aided by units of the UK military’s Black Watch regiment, placed a cordon of troops around the entire perimeter of Fallujah. Those civilians desiring to leave what would become essentially a city-wide free-fire zone, had to pass through checkpoints to escape the looming carnage.

The completeness of the destruction of Fallujah (pop. 300,000) is visible in these before/after aerial photos