Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

The problems today are not the the evil actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people.

Linda Milazzo:

Peace and non-violent solutions are beyond the capacity of this US government. We The People must govern. As an American, it is my responsibility to help redirect this country away from war and militarism toward a path of reason, compassion and equality. It is my personal duty to help make this happen

See what we can do at this article.

It’s time to put a stop to the BS. As Mario Savio said in 1964:

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

See and hear this short statement and this comment by comment by cartoonist Ted Rall.

And this one, too for stopping the machine:

Consider this: between June 2010 and June 2011, world grain prices almost doubled. In many places on this planet, that proved an unmitigated catastrophe. In those same months, several governments fell, rioting broke out in cities from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, to Nairobi, Kenya, and most disturbingly three new wars began in Libya, Yemen, and Syria. Even on Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Bedouin tribes are now in revolt against the country’s interim government and manning their own armed roadblocks. And in each of these situations, the initial trouble was traceable, at least in part, to the price of that loaf of bread. If these upheavals were not “resource conflicts” in the formal sense of the term, think of them at least as bread-triggered upheavals.

Bread has classically been known as the staff of life. In much of the world, you can’t get more basic, since that daily loaf often stands between the mass of humanity and starvation. Still, to read present world politics from a loaf of bread, you first have to ask: of what exactly is that loaf made? Water, salt, and yeast, of course, but mainly wheat, which means when wheat prices increase globally, so does the price of that loaf — and so does trouble.

To imagine that there’s nothing else in bread, however, is to misunderstand modern global agriculture. Another key ingredient in our loaf — call it a “factor of production” — is petroleum. Yes, crude oil, which appears in our bread as fertilizer and tractor fuel. Without it, wheat wouldn’t be produced, processed, or moved across continents and oceans.

And don’t forget labor. It’s an ingredient in our loaf, too, but not perhaps in the way you might imagine. After all, mechanization has largely displaced workers from the field to the factory. Instead of untold thousands of peasants planting and harvesting wheat by hand, industrial workers now make tractors and threshers, produce fuel, chemical pesticides, and nitrogen fertilizer, all rendered from petroleum and all crucial to modern wheat growing. If the labor power of those workers is transferred to the wheat field, it happens in the form of technology. Today, a single person driving a huge $400,000 combine, burning 200 gallons of fuel daily, guided by computers and GPS satellite navigation, can cover 20 acres an hour, and harvest 8,000 to 10,000 bushels of wheat in a single day.

Next, without financial capital — money — our loaf of bread wouldn’t exist. It’s necessary to purchase the oil, the fertilizer, that combine, and so on. But financial capital may indirectly affect the price of our loaf even more powerfully. When there is too much liquid capital moving through the global financial system, speculators start to bid-up the price of various assets, including all the ingredients in bread. This sort of speculation naturally contributes to rising fuel and grain prices.

The final ingredients come from nature: sunlight, oxygen, water, and nutritious soil, all in just the correct amounts and at just the right time. And there’s one more input that can’t be ignored, a different kind of contribution from nature: climate change, just now really kicking in, and increasingly the key destabilizing element in bringing that loaf of bread disastrously to market.

Dozens of Israeli lawmakers voted against the measure, including Nitzan Horowitz. Horowitz said, “We are dealing with a legislation that is an embarrassment to Israeli democracy and makes people around the world wonder if there is actually a democracy here.

This is a blatant and a resounding shutting of people’s mouths. This is a thought police. There is no choice but to use this word. Fascism at its worst is raging,” he wrote.

The Jewish daily newspaper, The Forward, issued an editorial claiming “a boycott can be a legitimate use of non-violent protest to achieve a worthy goal.” The editors of the paper then drew a line through the sentence, along with several others, to illustrate the type of reasonable thoughts that will be punishable under the new law.

See and hear the Democracy Now! interview with Gal Beckerman.

The liberal, progressive base appears to have no breaking point with the Democrats here in Washington. And that’s true for—that’s also true for the liberal intelligentsia. They have no—when you ask them, “Do you have any breaking point? How bad do these Democrats have to be, even though the Republicans are worse, for you to begin conditioning your vote, demanding more vigorous debates in the presidential primary, demanding more candidates, demanding rights for third parties, as the Center for Competitive Democracy has been pushing for? They have no breaking point. And if you have no breaking point, you have no moral compass, and people like Barack Obama know that you can be had. And indeed, they’ve been had….

See and hear the Democracy Now! interview with Ralph Nader.

‎She comes to Washington at the request of Harry Reid to head a special congressional oversight entity, pursuant to the Wall Street collapse and bailout, does a sterling job, has a heavy cross-examination of Timothy Geithner in public. He didn’t like that, and he never forgot that. And she is—then finds herself in Treasury, wondering whether she’s going to be the new head of this agency, which passed as part of the Dodd-Frank bill.

And it turns out that she was allowed to build it. She recruited very competent people in the agency. I think it sets the standard for American consumer protection, in terms of competent staff. And then she wants the job. Everybody knows she wants the job. But listen to how this coward in the White House handled it yesterday. He said, “Elizabeth Warren, you’ve done a great job building this agency, and one of your charges was to find a director. And you have found a great director, Richard Cordray.” Imagine. He puts the words in her mouth, when he knows very well that she wanted this job as the culmination of her career. And it’s too bad that the leading women’s organization, such as NOW and [Feminist] Majority and others, did not take a strong stand, because this was a legitimate women’s issue, not just a consumer issue. There was sexism involved here. They’re too involved in other things, and they didn’t take a strong stand for her on behalf of all the working women in America, many of them poor, many of them chief candidates for continued Wall Street ripoffs and crimes.

See and hear the Democracy Now! interview with Ralph Nader.

The Obama administration is accused of going over the top in pursuing government whistleblowers, following the Wikileaks affair, finds the BBC‘s Tom Burridge in Washington.

Among multiple layers of deception and newspeak, the official Washington spin on the strategic quagmire in Afghanistan simply does not hold. No more than “50-75 ‘al-Qaeda types’ in Afghanistan”, according to the CIA, have been responsible for draining the US government by no less than US $10 billion a month, or $120 billion a year.

See the Al-Jazeera article by Pepe Escobar.