by Stephen Lerner in The Nation:

“Beck, right-wingers and Wall Street sympathizers went ballistic because they knew the ideas I talked about are far from being a secret leftist conspiracy; in fact, they’re in sync with the thinking of most Americans. In my talk, I raised a very simple yet powerful idea: that homeowners, students, citizens and workers should make the same practical decisions Wall Street and corporate CEOs make every day—they should reject bad financial deals.”

As long as Wall Street and the superrich feel secure and confident, they have no reason to negotiate a fair deal with the rest of us. Only by creating uncertainty and instability for them—by disrupting unfair business as usual—can we build the strength to challenge their stranglehold on our economy and our democracy.

But I don’t think it was just my theorizing about power relationships and the economy that set off such a frenzy. It was the prospect that average Americans could take a series of concrete and practical steps, including direct action and civil disobedience, to make Wall Street pay for the trillions it stole from us. Ordinary Americans have the power and the opportunity to go on offense right now—with the immediate goals of keeping millions of people in their homes and raising revenue for cities and states to save jobs and critical services.

See the short article for the concrete steps.

by Allison Kilkenny for The Nation:

Corporate tax dodging has proven to be an incredibly unifying issue, one that actually unites Republicans, Independents and Democrats.

Even papa bear Bill O’Reilly recently teed off on GE, which didn’t pay any taxes in 2010 despite making a whopping $14 billion in profits. When was the last time O’Reilly and Progressive agreed on, well, anything?… Chicago’s William T. Shehan IV, a US Army veteran, explained that he feels it’s his duty to protest this practice of corporate tax evasion. “As a Veteran I swore to defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic…. The behavior of the corporations and elected officials has made it necessary for ‘We the People’ to alter or abolish our relationship with the aforementioned organizations, replace the elected officials, repeal unjust laws and to put in place safeguards to insure a secure future.”

The Kill Team
Here’s what’s being done in your name. (Warning! The pictures are disturbing! Viewer discretion is advised.)

• War crime files and
• Death zone and
• Motorcycle kill

From Democracy Now!:

One of the worst things about executing an innocent prisoner, exonerated by DNA and recanting witnesses, is that the actual perpetrator is free and might do it again. More than anything else, this makes capital punishment an example of the original, primitive, barbaric scapegoat ritual.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of the well-known Georgia death row prisoner Troy Anthony Davis, likely setting the stage for Georgia to schedule his execution. Troy Davis was convicted in 1989 of killing an off-duty white police officer, Mark MacPhail. Since then, seven of the nine non-police witnesses who fingered Davis have recanted their testimony. There’s no physical evidence that ties Davis to the crime scene.”

by Philip Giraldi for The American Conservative (never let it be said that I never cite conservative sources):

The attack on the USS Liberty by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats on June 8, 1967, has almost faded from memory, but new evidence suggests that the White House might actually have had prior knowledge that the ship would be struck by Israel’s armed forces. In the worst attack ever carried out on a U.S. naval vessel in peacetime, 34 American sailors and civilian personnel were killed and 171 more wounded in the two hour assault, which was clearly intended to sink the intelligence-gathering vessel operating in international waters collecting information on the ongoing Six-Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors….

“To those who object that Lyndon Baines Johnson would not have sunk so low as to allow an American warship to be attacked, it should be observed that LBJ’s refusal to allow air cover might mean that the situation was being managed to produce a “correct” outcome. One might also recall that Lyndon Johnson was possibly the most pro-Israel president in American history, tilting heavily towards the Jewish state on foreign policy issues starting with his time as a congressman all the way through his years in the White House. When he was president he declared a “strategic alliance” with Israel….

“WikiLeaks has demonstrated that the United States has a secret government that operates with little in the way or transparency or restraint. Unfortunately, it has had that kind of government for a long time, and the fate of the USS Liberty could be a manifestation of how the White House might actually have colluded in the deaths of American servicemen and then engaged in a cover-up to conceal what it had done. It’s time to open the windows and introduce a breath of fresh air….”

by Mark Hertsgaard for The Nation:

“If anything demonstrates the blind spots in Obama’s oft-stated support for clean energy—and the nation’s need for a bold alternative vision—it is his response to the Fukushima crisis, which at press time had made tap water in Tokyo, nearly 200 miles away, unsafe for infants to drink. The Fukushima disaster has led such previously firm proponents as German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the government of China to announce that they will halt or pause planned expansions of nuclear power; but it’s full speed ahead for Barack Obama.”