Tuesday, November 5, 2019

No News Blackout is acceptable.


From Elizabeth Woodworth:

Not reported by ANY corporate media was the October 2 London protest to protect Julian Assange, led by Pink Floyd's 
world famous co-founder, Roger Waters and award-winning journalist John Pilger, in front of Britain's Home Office.  
About 1,000 people attended.

Roger Waters, one of the top UK performers of all time ("Dark Side of the Moon"), described the media blackout last

This is incredible, given that Assange was interviewed in 2010 by Sir David Frost (the only person to have interviewed 
all US presidents and UK prime ministers for many decades) on Al Jazeera

There are no charges against Assange.   At the Westminster magistrate's extradition hearing six days ago John Pilger 
was present and reported that Assange could barely speak or think.  Assange was not permitted to see his defence 
documents while in this "court". John's description is utterly appalling.

The truth about Julian's character was recently reported by the Ecuadorian diplomat at the Ecuadorian embassy in 

The media is now entirely complicit as the UK bows to US dominance, while turning its back on its own laws in an 
atrocious violation of human rights.

Julian needs a network of people to co-ordinate a grass-roots movement to press for his freedom -- but most people 
as of 2019 have never heard of Assange, thanks to the presstitute media.  Paul Craig Roberts has just mounted a 

Until something major gets organized, it is possible to write to Julian with encouragement.  His prisoner number 
must be included on the envelop or the letter will not be delivered in Belmarsh maximum security prison, where 
he is not permitted to speak to other prisoners.  Here is what is recommended for writing to him:

Apparently, because he gets a lot of mail, it should be a short letter, telling him anything you have done, or want to do, to try to help him.

Mr. Julian Assange
Prisoner # A9379AY
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB UK

Best to all,

Elizabeth Woodworth
Victoria, Canada

Sunday, November 3, 2019

WATCH: Cops Strap Woman to a Chair, Torture Her with Taser Over Refusing to Sign a Ticket



 November 2, 2019




Boulder, CO — A Boulder County woman got an unfortunate lesson in police brutality recently and the video of it looks like something out of 1930s Germany.  After attempting to exercise her rights not to incriminate herself, she found out the hard way police will not only taser you when you’re in handcuffs, but they’ll taser you when you’re completely restrained.

Saturday, November 2, 2019

Roger Waters, NGOs And Many Others Condemn Revoking Of Amazonian Lawyer Steven Donziger’s Law License

From:  Activist Post

On September 17th, a formal bar licensing hearing in New York was held for Steven Donziger, a lawyer who fought to clean up Chveron’s environmental oil disaster in Ecuador. Donziger ended up being targeted in collusion by a judge and the company in what Amazon Watch, a U.S.-based environmental entity has called, a “well-financed corporate retaliation SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) campaign in history.”
Amazon Watch reports:
“On September 17th, I (Paul Paz y Miño) testified on behalf of Donziger at a formal bar licensing hearing in New York, where for the first time witnesses were able to address the facts of Chevron’s fraud in bringing its retaliatory civil RICO (“racketeering”) case designed to try to undermine the legitimate $9.5 billion judgment won by Ecuadorian communities in 2011.”
“Several witnesses at the hearing explained how Chevron and its lawyers at the infamous Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm – led by Randy Mastro, former deputy mayor to Rudy Guiliani – engaged in unethical and illegal acts to target Donziger based largely on the testimony of a corrupt witness who was paid at least $2 million by the company and who later admitted to lying under oath. Many respected lawyers, authors, and activists also testified on Donziger’s behalf. Without exception, all described Donziger as a man dedicated to justice in Ecuador on behalf of Chevron’s victims, who was framed by Chevron and its corrupt witness Alberto Guerra, who claimed without any corroborating evidence that Donziger had approved a bribe to a judge,” Paul Paz y Miño, Amazon Watch’s Director of Outreach wrote.
Amazon Watch further provided a detailed recap of the Donziger saga:
  • In 2011, Chevron was found liable in Ecuador for the deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into the Amazon between 1964 and 1992, decimating indigenous groups and provoking an outbreak of cancer that has killed hundreds if not thousands of people.
  • Four levels of courts in Ecuador – including its supreme and constitutional courts – imposed damages on Chevron of at least $9.5 billion; most of the pollution, including an estimated 1,000 unlined toxic waste pits, continue to poison soils, rivers, and groundwater.
  • Having definitively lost the case in Ecuador, Chevron abruptly removed all of its assets from the country and never paid a dime to the affected communities.
  • In the RICO case, Chevron bribed its star witness Alberto Guerra and used false evidence to try to criminalize human rights lawyer Steven Donziger and the Ecuadorian communities fighting for cleanup.
  • Donziger’s law license was suspended in New York based on the allegation that he was “an immediate threat to the public interest” due to his litigation against Chevron.
  • With U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan as an ally, Chevron has demanded Donziger surrender his computer and cell phone for inspection by the company so that it can sue or target anybody Donziger has been in touch with, or anyone supporting the campaign for justice in Ecuador.
  • Judge Kaplan has held Donziger in civil contempt, seized his passport, and fined him an exorbitant $200,000 per day for refusing to turn over his computer and phone while an appeal is pending.
  • Judge Kaplan himself then filed criminal contempt charges against Donziger and asked the federal prosecutor in New York to prosecute him; the prosecutor refused.
  • Judge Kaplan then appointed private lawyers from a corporate law firm and deputized them to act as “government prosecutors” to target Donziger. Pending trial, Donziger has been confined to home detention and required to wear an electronic monitoring device for the last two months.
  • Chevron has tried to undermine the very idea of corporate accountability with its unprecedented, unethical, and illegal attacks against Steven Donziger and those who stand up for a proper environmental cleanup in Ecuador.
Activist Post has been covering the story of Steven Donziger since earlier this year when this reporter first learned about the judicial abuses and abhorrent deplorable actions of NY District Court Justice Lewis Kaplan in favor of Chevron.  MORE

Friday, November 1, 2019

The “Deep State” Has Been Redefined as Career Bureaucrats Doing Their Patriotic Duty

From:  GLOBAL RESEARCH
ARTICLE

By Edward Curtin
Global Research, November 01, 2019

It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news.  There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers.  What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor.  But with a twisted twist.
The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.
This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations.  In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back,” writes:
Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the “deep state,” a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.
The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration’s media problems come not from “fake news” but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic “deep state” but simply from the state—the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.
Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition – “unelected bureaucrats” – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected.  State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.
Drip by drip over the past few years, this “state bureaucracy” meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.
Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him” asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.
In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning – “New York Times Confirms: It’s Trump Versus the Deep State”– originally published at The American Conservative and widely reprintedthe lead-in to the article proper reads: “Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.”  So the “powerful bureaucracy” redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is.  Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.
Then there is The New York Times’ columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:
Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he’s [Trump] right. There is a deep state…there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’ because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don’t have a monarch, we don’t have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.
So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, “in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’” as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of. MORE