April 26, 2012

The insane drug war isn't going to end anytime soon, apparently....

from AlterNet:



Just Another Drug Warrior: Obama Defends War on Pot in New Rolling Stone Interview


The Obama administration is under fire for its assault on state-approved medical marijuana programs, and President Barack Obama is gearing up for the presidential election by shedding responsibility for raiding dispensaries. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone publisher Jann S. Wenner, Obama attempted to defend his administration's war on pot as consistent with his 2008 campaign promise -- one medical marijuana advocates have not forgotten -- to respect state medical marijuana laws. In the interview, Obama deflected blame for the crackdown onto federal prosecutors and what he considers to be illegitimate operations in legal dispensaries. His arguments, however, are flawed.

Obama told Rolling Stone:



But for medical marijuana to be safe and regulated, there must be providers. What's more, marijuana patients have, indeed, been arrested. And as dispensaries continue to close -- and states fear opening them -- people who use marijuana medically but buy it illegally are offered little to no protection from prosecution.

Obama further defended busting medical marijuana dispensaries by alleging that they sell to recreational users:



But dispensaries do not determine who is a legitimate marijuana patient. In Colorado, for example, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issues medical marijuana cards to patient applicants. In other states, licensed doctors admit patients to a medical marijuana program. Determining whether those prescriptions are legitimate is not the job of dispensary operators, nor should they be prosecuted for providing medicine to patients who have obtained proof that marijuana helps them. Similarly, such a medical judgement is not one the Department of Justice, or Obama, is qualified to make. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/908790/just_another_drug_warrior%3A_obama_defends_war_on_pot_in_new_rolling_stone_interview/

April 25, 2012

Crime boasting for profit

from Salon.com:



Crime boasting for profit
Shielded from all forms of accountability, a CIA official is able to publish a book glorifying his illegal acts

By Glenn Greenwald


On December 7, 2007, The New York Times reported that the CIA “in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program.” Documents obtained when the ACLU asked a federal judge to hold the CIA in contempt of court — for destruction of evidence which that judge had ordered be produced — subsequently revealed that the agency had actually “destroyed 92 videotapes of terror-suspect interrogations.” The videotapes recorded interrogations of detainees who were waterboarded and otherwise tortured. The original NYT article, by Mark Mazzetti, reported that “the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who was the head of the Directorate of Operations, the agency’s clandestine service” (the NYT later reported that some White House officials had participated in the deliberations and even advocated the tapes’ destruction).

Destruction of these tapes was so controversial because it seemed so obviously illegal. At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the U.S. Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”).

In 2008, Attorney General Michael Mukasey appointed a Special Prosecutor to determine if criminal charges should be filed. When I was writing my last book about the legal immunity bestowed on political elites even for egregious crimes, I actually expected that Rodriguez would be indicted and that his indictment would be an exception to the rule of elite immunity which I was documenting. As I wrote in my book, “even our political class, I thought, couldn’t allow lawbreaking this brazen to go entirely unpunished.” But I was quite wrong about that. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.salon.com/2012/04/25/crime_boasting_for_profit/singleton/

April 25, 2012

Collapse of conservative Dutch government might be good news for Amsterdam coffee shops

from High Times:



Since the 1970s, the Netherlands’ legendary cannabis coffeeshops have been officially “tolerated” by the government, meaning that while technically illegal, they’ve nonetheless operated openly, with hundreds of locations in Amsterdam alone selling limited amounts of marijuana to the public.

Despite their being tightly regulated and contributing considerably to the nation’s tourism industry, however, the conservative government has been steadily working to curtail or eliminate the coffeeshops, specifically by proposing a “Weed Pass” plan that would restrict access to only citizens of the Netherlands willing to register as a member of a private club, with each coffeeshop allowed just 2,000 members.

The Weed Pass plan was passed into law in 2011 and was set to take effect starting with several locations in the south of the Netherlands on May 1 of this year. But this week several important developments have thrown the future of the law into doubt. Most notably, the coalition forming the Dutch government dissolved on April 23, amid an internal argument over budgetary priorities.

Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his cabinet have since officially resigned in advance of national elections to be held in the near future, with the possibility of a new government taking power that’s opposed to the Weed Pass. While at the same time, a group of Dutch coffeeshop owners and their allies have been fighting the Weed Pass in court, charging that the proposed new restrictions are in violation of the nation’s constitution. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://hightimes.com/news/bean/7648

April 25, 2012

Detroit light rail backers ready to move forward

from the Detroit Free Press:


The private-sector group that wants to build a 3-mile light rail line on Woodward Avenue from downtown Detroit to the New Center said today it has raised all of the money it will need to build the line – and is pledging to fund the operations of the system privately for the first 10 years after it’s built.

The M-1 Rail Group outlined the details in a report it has sent to the federal government. The group of private investors and philanthropic groups behind the effort said they would commit to paying the estimated $5.1 million annual cost of operating the Woodward rail line through 2025.

That’s a significant step for the project. How to pay for operating the system has been a key point of contention in a city that’s now under a consent deal with the state to oversee its finances and plans to slash millions from its annual appropriations for the city’s bus system.

The group would then donate the project’s assets to the appropriate agency, such as a regional transit authority that Gov. Rick Snyder and the Legislature are working to create for southeast Michigan to oversee a big new network of rapid-transit buses on Woodward, Michigan Avenue, Gratiot and Hall Roads connecting Detroit to key suburbs, Metro Airport and Ann Arbor. ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.freep.com/article/20120423/NEWS01/120423048/Woodward-Avenue-light-rail-line-M-1-Rail-Group?odyssey=tab%7Ctopnews%7Ctext%7CFRONTPAGE

April 25, 2012

Grist: Let’s put an end to ‘dietary tribalism’

Let’s put an end to ‘dietary tribalism’
By Andy Bellatti


Every time I’m on social media, I am reminded of a growing trend that worries me — let’s call it dietary tribalism. I use this term to refer to the many fractured groups with conflicting dietary views who, for the most part, don’t realize just how much they have in common.

This recent piece in the New York Times about the “challenges of plant-based eating in a meat-based world” got me thinking, as it described several people’s efforts to adopt a vegan lifestyle and how they were fraught with challenges. Not only did I find this lens problematic (for one, not everyone finds the transition that difficult), but I was struck by how it repeated a familiar, yet inaccurate frame: that one is either a vegan or they’ll eat an entire cow in one sitting.

But it bothered me even more that the comments turned, predictably, into “veganism isn’t natural” vs. “everyone should go vegan.” It was almost the perfect microcosm of what happens in the food world when, rather than discuss issues we have in common, we take sides. All this mud-slinging detracts from a more important conversation.

As I see it, all Americans need to eat more plant-based foods and less processed food, and to be more mindful of where their food comes from, how it is grown, how the people who grow it are treated, and how our dietary choices affect the environment. Instead of these core messages sinking in, dietary tribalism is rampant these days. You have – just to name a few — the Paleo folks, the vegans, the raw vegans, the low-carbers, and the fruitarians. And while there is certainly something productive and empowering about engaging and connecting with like-minded individuals, these groups often turn into echo chambers where everyone agrees and, occasionally, points out how one or more of the other tribes has it all wrong. Meanwhile, Big Food continues churning out a litany of highly processed junk, young children are developing Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”), genetically modified crops — and the pesticides they’re engineered to resist — are seemingly everywhere, and food support for the poor is seriously threatened. .....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://grist.org/sustainable-food/lets-put-an-end-to-dietary-tribalism/

April 25, 2012

Wars of Attrition: Green Zones of the Mind, Guerrillas, and a Technical Knockout in Afghanistan

from TomDispatch:



Wars of Attrition
Green Zones of the Mind, Guerrillas, and a Technical Knockout in Afghanistan

By Nick Turse


Recently, after insurgents unleashed sophisticated, synchronized attacks across Afghanistan involving dozens of fighters armed with suicide vests, rocket-propelled grenades, and small arms, as well as car bombs, the Pentagon was quick to emphasize what hadn’t happened. “I’m not minimizing the seriousness of this, but this was in no way akin to the Tet Offensive,” said George Little, the Pentagon’s top spokesman. “We are looking at suicide bombers, RPG (rocket propelled grenade), mortar fire, etcetera. This was not a large-scale offensive sweeping into Kabul or other parts of the country.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta weighed in similarly. “There were,” he insisted, “no tactical gains here. These are isolated attacks that are done for symbolic purposes, and they have not regained any territory.” Such sentiments were echoed by many in the media, who emphasized that the attacks “didn’t accomplish much” or were “unsuccessful.”

Even granting the need to spin the assaults as failures, the official American reaction to the coordinated attacks in Kabul, the Afghan capital, as well as at Jalalabad airbase, and in Paktika and Logar Provinces, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of guerrilla warfare and, in particular, of the type being waged by the Haqqani network, a crime syndicate transformed by the conflict into a leading insurgent group. Here’s the “lede” that should have run in every newspaper in America: More than 40 years after the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, after more than a decade of war in Afghanistan, even after reviving counterinsurgency doctrine (only to see it crash-and-burn in short order), the U.S. military still doesn’t get it.

Think of this as a remarkably unblemished record of “failure to understand” stretching from the 1960s to 2012, and undoubtedly beyond. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175533/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_memory_failure_at_the_pentagon/#more

April 25, 2012

Katrina vanden Heuvel: Koch Brothers Exposed

from The Nation:



Koch Brothers Exposed
Katrina vanden Heuvel on April 23, 2012 - 5:23 PM ET


With an unflinching investigative look at the Koch brothers’ money and power, Brave New Films has once again created a film full of rollicking and rigorous facts that informs and challenges corporate media with the truth. The latest in a series of tough and sharp social justice films—check out Rethink Afghanistan, WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price and Sick for Profit—Koch Brothers Exposed should be a wake-up call for people across the political spectrum to take action to halt the selling off of our democracy.

As radio and television host Ed Schultz says of the film, “Every person in this country who cares about democracy should care about this work.”

I was interviewed for the film—seemed a valuable project because it raises perhaps the central question of our time: are we a democracy or are we now a plutocracy? And what kind of country, what kind of society, what kind of economy do we want to live in?

Throughout American history—though there have been major challenges and pitfalls—there has been a degree of balance between government and market. But we are now living in a moment when the extremist right wants to shatter that balance and is using its resources to throw the country back to Gilded Age inequality. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blog/167502/koch-brothers-exposed

April 25, 2012

Jim Hightower: Romney's Economic Fix and the Inequity of Private-Equity Hustlers

Published on Wednesday, April 25, 2012 by Creators.com
Romney's Economic Fix and the Inequity of Private-Equity Hustlers

by Jim Hightower


What are these phantasmagoric money machines that they call "private-equity firms?" They're much in the news these days, because a fellow who was a private-equity magnate is presently running for president. Mitt Romney piled up a quarter-billion-dollar personal fortune through his Wall Street equity outfit, Bain Capital, and he now claims that, because of his success in that business, he knows how to "fix" our economy.

Before you clear that, note that private equity whizzes are all about The Fix — not necessarily a good thing. They operate by borrowing big piles of cash at high interest rates from rich speculators to buy out XYZ Corp. Then, to meet the interest payments owed to the speculators (and to siphon off a financial killing for themselves), the fixers do two things: One, they plunder XYZ's assets, selling the profitable chunks of the corporation; and two, they severely downsize the XYZ workforce, firing as many workers as possible and demanding deep wage cuts and benefit givebacks from the employees they keep.

It's a raw redistribution-of-wealth scheme, shifting XYZ's wage payments from its many workers to a handful of wealthy high-rollers. The process downsizes America's middle class, while creating no real economic value. Nothing equitable about it.

But the fix also includes a set of very special partners, few of whom are even aware that they're in on the deal: taxpayers. The private-equity business model is not structured on old-fashioned, free-enterprise principles, but on a skewed system of tax loopholes punched into federal law by these financiers' lobbyists and the lawmakers who do Wall Street's bidding. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/04/25

April 25, 2012

Glowing fish illuminates environmental health hazards

from the Independent UK:



Harmful chemicals circulating in the environment may affect more parts of the body than was previously believed, according to a new study.

A team of researchers from the University of Exeter and University College London found that environmental oestrogens may contaminate organs that until now scientists had not considered vulnerable to their deleterious effects.

.....(snip).....

But the UK team engineered a clever solution. The researchers created a transgenic zebrafish, a species routinely used in toxicology as a model for human health. Its transparent skin allows a view into how its organs form in early life. The group developed a highly sensitive fish that when exposed to oestrogens emits a florescent green signal to show which parts of the body are responding. The model provides an unprecedented look at where the chemicals travel in the body, like an anatomical map of harm.

“This is a very exciting development in the international effort to understand the impact of oestrogenic chemicals on the environment and human health,” says Charles Tyler, an environmental biologist at the University of Exeter and one of the study’s lead investigators. “This zebrafish gives us a more comprehensive view than ever before of the potential effects of these hormone-disrupting chemicals on the body. .................... “We found that these chemicals are penetrating more tissue sights than was envisaged previously,” says Dr. Tyler. “They’re not just affecting the reproductive organs, but also brain and skeletal tissue, and eye function.” ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2012/04/25/glowing-fish-illuminates-environmental-health-hazards/

April 25, 2012

Internet doomsday and the Estonian cyber mafia

from the Independent UK:



Hundreds of thousands of computers will simultaneously lose access to the internet on 9 July, unless their owners check for a virus that may have remained hidden for several years, the FBI has warned.

The so-called "internet doomsday" will come when the bureau turns off a server system its investigators installed in November, when they broke up an Estonian crime ring that was running a global internet advertising scam.

Since 2007, the six men had been using a Trojan to seize control of computers from all over the world. Their malware was able to take over PCs and Apple products, though iPhones and iPads were not affected.

The virus, called DNS Changer, would redirected the web browsers of victims from sites they wanted to visit to ones controlled by the gang. Revenue from adverts tied to those sites earned the criminals an estimated $14m (£9.1m) in commission. The only noticeable effects of the virus were a slight slowing of internet service, an increase in pop-up adverts, and the anti-virus software having been disabled. By late last year, when the FBI and Estonian authorities shut down the racket, the virus had seized control of about half a million computers. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/fbi-warns-virus-victims-face-internet-doomsday-7676060.html