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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. Support Opednews. Make a tax deductible donation to make OEN Strong.   Daily HeadlinesMonday's events may have been purely random, events that started like a snowball rolling downhill after a morning speech by Secretary of State Kerry and ending with an history-changing Monday night announcement by Senate leader Harry Reid that he was postponing a Senate vote because of events of the day. he attacks working people in Canada and around the world are facing right now are a classic case of The Shock Doctrine. By earl ofari hutchinson Zimmerman Proves Again and Again that Zimmerman was Never the Victim George Zimmerman proved again that he was never the victim in the killing of Trayvon Martin. The proof this time was his being briefly detained for allegedly threatening his now estranged wife along with a report that he had a gun. By Move to Amend An Affront to the First Amendment: SCOTUS Prohibits Peaceful Demonstrations On Its Property The latest policy governing protest at the Supreme Court is yet another indicator of diminishing first amendment rights for "we the people." While the Court dismantles our First Amendment rights, it is simultaneously expanding inherent rights for artificial entities, like corporations. By David Swanson The Other Super Power Is Winning It's not Russia. It's not al Qaeda. It's not Bashar al-Assad. The other super power is the people of the world -- and the people of, but not by or for, the United States. By William K. Black, J.D., Ph.D. Not with a Bang but a Whimper -- the SEC Enforcement Team's Propaganda Campaign  The New York Times has one of those "inside" stories that unintentionally demonstrate the collapse of justice and financial reporting. Why are these videos suddenly news when they have been publicly circulating the web for weeks? Here's why: The videos are meant to market the war, not to "prove" who committed the atrocities. (CBS News and others have reported that the White House case for war has been described as "largely circumstantial.") By Rabbi Michael Lerner How to Slow Down the Rush to War: What Obama Should Do About Syria The tragic dilemma we now face is that the murderous Assad regime in Syria should have been overthrown long ago, but the U.S. has no moral standing or credibility to be the agent of that overthrow. By John Whitehead Farewell to Big Sister: Janet Napolitano's Orwellian Legacy Lives On Under Napolitano's leadership, the DHS managed to entrench the federal government's power in an increasingly Orwellian America at great cost to Americans' civil liberties. Lest we forget, the following are some of Napolitano's "greatest hits" when it comes to civil-liberties violations. By Rob Kall Elliot Fineman-- The Starbucks Boycott, Because of their Pro Gun Stance, Is Gaining Traction  Starbucks is allowing guns in their establishments. There's a movement to boycott Starbucks to stop it. I talk with the organizer. Public schools aren't doing a good job; and the people who run them tend to cover up the reasons for this. We need to be candid about what is being done to the children. "Fox News host Dana Perino this week suggested that atheists should leave the country instead of trying to maintain the separation of church and state." I wonder what she has in mind for agnostics. Animal cruelty is found all over the world. Sadly, in some places it is worse for the animals than in others. Spain is a country which needs to treat their animals better -much better. Of course, we do too. "As the situation in Syria deteriorates with a threatened U.S. airstrike over President Bashar al-Assad's chemical weapons, the Damascus regime still controls one of the largest conventional hydrocarbon resources in the eastern Mediterranean." The administration's public case for chemical weapons use by the Syrian government is extremely weak, and former high-level intelligence officers say that publicly-available information proves that the Syrian government likely did not carry out the chemical weapons attacks. The wide swath of destruction Obama has overseen on behalf of the corporate state includes eradication of most of our civil liberties and our privacy, the expansion of imperial war, the use of kill lists, abject subservience to Wall Street's criminal class and the military-industrial complex, the relentless persecution of whistle-blowers, mass incarceration of poor people of color and distress of the poor and working class. the title says most of it. I interview my go-to expert on mythic and symbolic dimensions of culture. By Carmen Yarrusso Criminalize Political Lies to Save Planet Earth We need to treat political lies as a very serious crime with very serious penalties on multiple occasions over the last two years Russia has made data public on contaminated imports from Japan which have been sent back due to radiation concerns. Since many of the weapons we would use for "military action" contain depleted uranium, a heavy metal made to punch through concrete, steel, armor, and people alike, the very ground in Syria will turn radioactive, giving rise to the hideous spike in unspeakable birth deformities that we now see in Iraq and Afghanistan. By Sam Amer It Is Israel Because of lack of direct evidence, Israel may be behind the poison-gas attack in Syria. According to our information, is that the President is being given cooked-up intelligence because John Brennan, the head of the CIA, and James Clapper, the confessed perjurer, have thought it in their best interests to cater to the wishes of the White House, which have been very clear: "this time, we want to strike Syria." It's a terrible situation, it's a political sort of thing now. By David Swanson Kerry Couldn't Sell a Used Car Kerry is trying to sell the same used car to people who want an ambulance and other people who want a tank. With the amount of Cesium sitting in endangered storage tanks at three to four times what was in Chernobyl, and risk of leaks rising, the Japanese government has taken over the clean-up of the Tokyo Electric Power Company ( TEPCO) reactor site, at Fukushima. If Syria is a "threat to world security," like Iraq was a "threat to world security," like Iran is alleged to be a "threat to world security," what kind of superpower is the United States? How low does the IQ have to be, how mentally impaired does the public have to be to fall for these absurd hysterical allegations? By Dave Lefcourt World's Oldest Constitutional Democracy Saved from Committing Self Inflected Wound on Itself by Ex KGB Head Putin  Last week @ the G20 economic conference in St Petersburg, Russia, Pres. Vladimir Putin in a private discussion w/ Pres. Obama suggested a plan to diffuse the crisis in Syria. He'd have Syrian Pres. Assad turn over his chemical weapons stock to the U.N. Yesterday Obama bought into Putin's idea thus saving Obama & the U.S. from committing a self inflected wound on itself by forestalling an attack on Syria. By Tom Engelhardt Michael T. Klare, 2040 or Bust If you're an oil exec, the world is a rosy place -- and I'm not talking about the pink haze of heat that's been rising from the burning American West all summer. I'm talking about energy consumption where the news just couldn't be cheerier. "Evil" as a political category is something worthy of the brain dead. The key question now revolves around the axis of warmongers -- Washington, Israel and the House of Saud. Will the Israel lobby, the more discreet but no less powerful Saudi lobby, and the Return of the Living Dead neo-cons convince the US Congress to fight their war? Despite strong opposition in Congress to the proposed military strike in Syria, no one in either chamber has yet challenged the administration's characterization of the intelligence. But the administration is vulnerable to the charge that it has put out an intelligence document that does not fully and accurately reflect the views of intelligence analysts. Latest ArticlesI hope that these images will haunt Americans forever. Our cowardice shows The battle between rich and poor is really a battle over mathematical conditions that have social consequences. What drives the math? What made fiat money, and paper money so problematical. Follow the math, and you will realize how the real enemy is inflation. Get a sense of the dynamic interplay between the private and public sector. LEST WE FORGET: On the Twelfth Anniversary of September 11, 2001 The profound terrorist tragedy of 9-11-01 must be viewed in the light of world events since then, in order for the necessary corrective actions to be taken. This article provides some of that perspective. There's a knotty procedural problem. Summers' appointment has to pass the 22-member Senate Banking Committee before moving on to the full Senate. Democrats have a two-member majority on that committee, but three Democratic Senators have already said they will not vote for Summers. The three -- Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Merkley, and Sherrod Brown -- are highly respected by the Democratic base. We need to take a look at our continued domestic use of weapons, specifically our ongoing love affair with deadly handguns. There have been some recent gun tragedies that have been under-reported or eclipsed by other news stories, perhaps because we have come to accept such violence as part of everyday American life. It doesn't have to be this way. As the US Congress gears up for its debate on intervention in Syria in the face of widespread domestic and international scepticism, the stakes are high for Obama, but much higher for democracy and for the principle of representation that underpins democracy. Congress's role, as that of any legislative body, is to act as a check on absolute power, not as an endorsement to it.  Best News Links from the WebAs one of the leading advocates for bipartisan immigration reform, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., had already firmly affixed himself to one cause deeply unpopular with conservatives heading into a re-election year. Graham is on board for launching targeted missile strikes in Syria to diminish its chemical weapon capacity and assist the rebels who have been stuck in a three-year slog with President Bashar Assad that's resulted in more than 100,000 dead. With Congress on the verge of considering whether to authorize President Barack Obama to launch a retaliatory attack on Syria, the United States and Russia on Monday embraced a proposal that would allow Syria to avoid a U.S. missile strike by relinquishing control of its chemical weapons. "President Obama said on Monday he would "run to ground" a proposal floated by the Russians that would wrest control of chemical weapons from Syria and would potentially head of a U.S. military strike against the Bashar Assad regime." "Russia has asked Syria to put its chemical weapons stockpiles under international control and then have them destroyed, in an attempt to avoid US military strikes." |
