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Bold and Daring: The Way Progressive News Should Be
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| If you have a problem reading this email, please click here to see the web page version You received this email because you signed up for it at OpEdNews. Unsubscribe instructions are at the bottom of this email. Philip Zack commented on an article the other day-- a great comment. I flagged it-- suggesting he turn it into an article He did. It was worthy of top headline status. Check it out. The Dance of Consent
The other day, the Chicago
Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup for Ice Hockey. The streets of the city
filled with people. Imagine if the streets of American cities filled
with people who were protesting. It could happen. It takes a different
kind of media to get them out there. That's a lot of what Opednews is
about. Willy Scanlon has a related take on sports in his article, War for America is a Spectator Sport: Part 1.
I'm heading out the the Socialism conference in
Chicago later today. Drop me an email if you'll be there. I'm hoping to
get some ideas on how to get past the pariah status socialism is given
by the mainstream or, as I've said many times, the corpstream media.
It also doesn't hurt that Michael Ratner and Jeremy Scahill will be speaking and Glenn Greenwald will be skyping a talk there.
We have three days to raise $2200
to make target budget. It won't happen unless people who care about
Opednews, and who can afford to, take the step to make the donation.
Even $5 or $10 helps.
thanks,
rob kall
  Daily Headlines
There's
a struggle for control of the world going on right now, a struggle to
keep it out of the hands of people everywhere. Global empires exist in
two forms, political and corporate, and the titans are locked in mortal
combat to retain supremacy. But all around them, people are waking up to
the fact that the power claimed over them by governments and
corporations only exists as long as the people cede it to them.
In
considering Obama's recent climate speech, I take issue with leading
climate-change blogger Joe Romm over whether Obama IS a "climate-change
hawk" or instead a psychopathic "bird of prey" who relentlessly promotes
the humanly unjustified and environmentally dangerous--indeed, probably
deadly--process of fracking.
Judging
by the one-fruity-flavor variety of US media chewing points, Russia has
been typecast -- no plot spoiler here -- as the villainous antagonist
that pits a lonely whistleblower from the National Security Agency
against the very government -- and even girlfriend -- he betrayed.
A
day after a controversial abortion bill was defeated in epic fashion,
Texas Governor Rick Perry has brought it back to life, calling for a new
special session of the Texas legislature in order to reconsider it. The
bill -- which bans all abortions after 20 weeks or pregnancy and enacts
tough new restrictions on clinics -- was defeated when time ran out
the last special session, thanks mostly to Davis and her 13-hour-long
filibuster on Tuesday.
Time
after time, we catch our authorities deceiving us. We do nothing,
mainly because most of the time it seems that others are in the firing
line. They say that what they do is for our own good, and we believe
them. That's convenient. Yet everyone seems surprised when inevitably
our democratic complacency leads to abuses of power.
When
Snowden came forward to identify himself as the source behind stories
on US secret surveillance. "I don't want public attention because I
don't want the story to be about me. I want it to be about what the US
government is doing." He also wrote, "I will be satisfied if the
federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive
powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an
instant."
Snowden
and Greenwald have not "aided the enemy" -- unless the American people
are the government's enemy. What they have done is embarrass the Obama
administration by exposing criminal activity. For the media's defenders
of power against truth, that's inexcusable.
Ecuador,
the South American nation considering an asylum request from fugitive
U.S. intelligence leaker Edward Snowden, renounced its U.S. trade
benefits today, saying they were being used as "blackmail." "Ecuador
doesn't accept pressure or threats from anyone and doesn't barter its
principles and sovereignty or submit to mercantile interests," President
Rafael Correa said today in a speech in the central province of Los
Rios. What Snowden revealed "is a terrible case of massive espionage,
both nationally and internationally that clearly threatens the right to
intimacy and the sovereignty of states."
One
function of the internet record collection is what is commonly referred
to as "data mining," and which the NSA calls "contact chaining." The
agency "analyzed networks with two degrees of separation (two hops) from
the target," the report says. In other words, the NSA studied the
online records of people who communicated with people who communicated
with targeted individuals.
By Andrew Schmookler
Think Horses, Not Unicorns (a message to people who have bought the Republican line on climate change) 
One
can believe that we have a huge conspiracy --- bigger by many orders of
magnitude than anything ever seen before -- to commit a scientific
hoax. Or one can believe that we have powerful corporations and the
political party that serves them following a well-established pattern of
deception for the sake of profits. Deciding which to believe shouldn't
be that hard. Think horses, not unicorns.
By Hamad S Alomar
Colored Or Colorless ? To me it seems sometimes a paradox. US is the best country that values the individual, yet it is probably the only country where people are identified by original land or color
Beyond Ethanol: Drop-In Biofuels Squeeze Gasoline From Plants
The first commercial cellulosic biofuel plant aims to turn Mississippi wood chips into diesel fuel and gasoline that are chemically identical to petroleum products. Can homegrown "drop-in" biofuels transform transportation?
Long
before the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act,
conspiracy broadcaster Alex Jones was warning his viewers that the
government was turning people gay by putting chemicals in their juice
boxes, water bottles, and potato chip bags that feminized men. "The
reason there are so many gay people now is because it's a chemical
warfare operation," Jones said in a June, 2010 clip that has gained
renewed attention since the DOMA ruling. "I have the government
documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with
chemicals so people don't have children."
On
the day this country was born, I would not be in Philly, its
birthplace, but Camden, its prototypical morgue. A habitually lawless
government has no business celebrating the Constitution, and with this
country being deliberately tortured and drown by its rulers, accompanied
by flag-waving acquiescence of deranged voters, each 4th of July has
turned into a sick and sad spectacle.
By Steven Jonas
Sex, the Military, and Combat Readiness When the issue of homosexuality in the US military and its open recognition without penalty (which in virtually all cases meant discharge), was front and center, the public concerns raised by both military and even more so by political opponents of gay equality in the military always was presented in the context of the issue of "combat readiness." Somehow rape never seemed to come in that context. This column considers it.
Atom-thick photovoltaic sheets could pack hundreds of times more power per weight than conventional solar cells.
By Bernard Starr
The Last Supper According to Judas in the Works by Famed Filmmaker Armondo Linus Acosta 
A
plethora of bible films have told the stories of religions' heroes and
villains. But none have explored the inner worlds of Jesus' Apostles.
Armondo Linus Acosta, in his latest film that is in development, "The
Last Super According to Judas" will offer an in-depth study of the
Apostles during a 24 hour period that changed the world.
sports and war have similar meanings
With
all the Supreme Court decisions and Paula Deen drama this week, some
very important climate news was given short shrift. Right-wingers love
to praise the power of free markets and declare that the private sector
can deal with any problem, but then turn around and insist that the
private sector will just throw up its hands in despair and collapse in
the face of new environmental rules.
Federal
investigators have told lawmakers they have evidence that USIS, the
contractor that screened Edward Snowden for his top-secret clearance,
repeatedly misled the government about the thoroughness of its
background checks, according to people familiar with the matter. The
alleged transgressions are so serious that a federal watchdog indicated
he plans to recommend that the Office of Personnel Management, which
oversees most background checks, end ties with USIS unless it can show
it is performing responsibly, the people said.
The
Obama administration's investigation into the leak of classified
information on Stuxnet, a U.S. cyberattack targeting Iran's nuclear
programs, has zeroed in on retired Marine General James Cartwright, the
general credited with presenting the idea of Stuxnet to the White House
in the first place. Stuxnet is particularly notable as the virus that
got away: in 2010, the virus managed to escape from the computers at the
Iran nuclear facility, spreading around the world. While the virus's
moment in the spotlight was embarrassing for the Obama administration,
it did reportedly manage to take out 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges in
Iran's facilities before going rogue.
By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
Syria: The Faces Behind The Terror The faces behind the uprising in Syria and the push for war.
A
grand jury has indicted Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the Boston Marathon
bombing. He faces 30 charges, including murder and using weapons of mass
destruction in an attack that killed three spectators and injured
hundreds more.
A
new peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of
Agricultural Sustainability found that conventional plant breeding, not
genetic engineering, is responsible for yield increases in major U.S.
crops. GM crops, also known as genetically engineered (GE) crops, can't
even take credit for reductions in pesticide use. The study's lead
author, Jack Heinemann, is not an anti-biotechnology activist, as
Monsanto might want you to believe. "I'm a genetic engineer. But there
is a different between being a genetic engineer and selling a product
that is genetically engineered," he states.
Senators
approved sweeping legislation Thursday to remake the nation's
immigration system for the first time in a generation by spending tens
of billions of dollars to bolster security along the U.S. southern
border and offering a path to citizenship for millions of illegal
immigrants. By a vote of 68 to 32, senators concluded a nearly
month-long debate of the 1,200-page measure. Fourteen Republicans voted
with every member of the Senate Democratic caucus to approve the bill.
Documents
show the FBI knew of a deadly plot against Occupy leaders -- one that
may still be active -- and has done nothing, possibly because it is
supporting it, reports TCBH journalist Dave Lindorff at WhoWhatWhy.org
Unlike
other oppressive and brutal governments, the Israelis and their
supporters directly influence (one might say corrupt) the policy makers
of many Western nations and this often makes their governments (most
specifically the U.S.) accomplices in Israel's abusive policies. This
being so, prioritizing Israel for boycott is not hypocrisy but rather
necessity.
By Tom Engelhardt
Todd Gitlin, Are "Intelligence" and Instigation Running Riot? Back in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute (BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco. The first story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded then pouring in from the invasion of Laos.
President
Obama claims he's off to Africa in search of trade. But the Chinese
have eclipsed the U.S. in that arena by offering "far better terms of
trade and investment than the Americans." Obama talks trade for public
consumption, while the U.S. military locks Africa in a cage of steel.
Latest Articles
Karachi Mayhem & Killings, terrorism & new players!
Truth, Justice, and the American way
It surely seems we have come a long way as a society; Selma Alabama, the scene of so many racial confrontations in the 1950's and 60's, elected their first Black Mayor in 2000 and their second in 2008. But the racists and Republicans are still at it. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, 184 proposed abusive voting changes have been withdrawn or blocked by the U.S. Justice Department, just since 1999.
Hanging Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine and Paul Revere
The government, corporations and banks that work together to oppress "We, The People," are persecuting the whistle- blowers, who are true patriots and heroes.
City Council votes to increase oversight of New York Police
Amid a growing national debate over security and privacy ignited by the National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden, the New York City Council this morning approved by veto-proof majorities a pair of bills aimed at increasing oversight of the Police Department and expanding New Yorkers' ability to sue over racial profiling by officers.  Best News Links from the Web
Clark
Stoeckley is Bradley Manning's most visible supporter at the soldier's
court-martial. He arrives each day in a white box truck with bold words
painted on the sides: "WikiLeaks TOP SECRET Mobile Information
Collection Unit." The provocative gag even has a nonworking satellite
dish and two fake security cameras on it. Stoeckley got involved after
seeing a video Manning gave to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. The
video showed a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed at
least eight people, including a Reuters news photographer and his
driver.
Revolt in Turkey: Interview with Turkish Marxist Dogan Fennibay | Socialist Organizer
President
Barack Obama said on Thursday that he wouldn't be scrambling military
jets to secure the capture of National Security Agency leak source
Edward Snowden, saying he wouldn't participate in "wheeling and dealing"
to get Snowden extradited back to the United States. Obama also said
that he has not spoken to China President Xi Jinping or Russian
President Vladimir Putin about Snowden's extradition. "I have not called
President Xi personally or President Putin personally," Obama said.
"And the reason is because, No. 1: I shouldn't have to."
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