Morning Fogs

Crap-O-Pipe-Dreams !!!

A white Egret in the Gulf of Mexico stand in stark contrast to the 

oil-blackened wetland reeds, 08/30/10. 

(photo: Julie Dermansky/Corbis)

Anti-Keystone Pipeline Lawsuit Coming

By Ben Geman, The Hill

30 October 11

Four environmental groups are preparing a lawsuit that alleges the Obama administration has not adequately studied how the proposed Keystone XL oil sands pipeline would affect several endangered species.

The lawsuit would add to the ongoing political and legal battle over TransCanada Corp.'s pipeline that would carry crude oil from Alberta's oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.

The groups sent a formal notice of intent to sue Thursday to the State Department - which is heading the federal review of the project - and several other agencies.

"State and [the US Fish and Wildlife Service] have failed to conduct formal consultation to consider the effects of the Keystone XL Pipeline project (Project) to the Whooping Crane, Interior Least Tern, Piping Plover, Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, Pallid Sturgeon, and Arkansas River Shiner," states the Oct. 27 letter from the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council and Nebraska Wildlife Federation.

The State Department issued a final environmental impact statement (EIS) in August that gave the project a largely favorable review, and hopes to make a final decision by the end of the year. The letter is designed to ensure the option to litigate if the permit is issued.

The groups, in the letter, allege the "biological assessment" prepared alongside the EIS and a subsequent "biological opinion" prepared by the US Fish and Wildlife Service were shoddy in their analysis of the pipeline's effect on the species.

For instance, the letter notes that "This unduly narrow analysis omits impacts such as the effects of habitat fragmentation from the Pipeline's pump sites, construction camps, and power lines."

It adds:

The [biological assessment] further fails to address numerous criticisms raised by FWS early on, including the need to adequately survey for the presence of listed species in the action area, quantify the total areas of habitat that would be lost to the Pipeline or the number of power lines that would be added, or catalog the locations where water depletions would come from and where water used for hydrostatic testing would be discharged, and how waterbodies and wetlands would be crossed.

The planned lawsuit comes in addition to separate, ongoing litigation by three other groups: the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Nebraska Resources Council and Friends of the Earth.

That litigation, filed in a Nebraska federal court, was expanded through an amended complaint this week that alleges the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service "unreasonably and unlawfully concurred that the Pipeline is ‘not likely to adversely affect' endangered and threatened species."

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fry-day night fever

Cr-A-ck-A-Press-Main-Street!!

Oakland, California, October 25, 2011. As police in para-military gear stop a 

march to Oscar Grant Plaza the marchers react. (photo: Marc Ash/RSN)

Journalists Abandon the Fourth Estate
By Leslie Griffith, Reader Supported News
28 October 11


"Occupy Oakland" participants are taking a few rubber bullets to the butt at this very moment. One thing is clear, the people are mad and they are not going to take it anymore. This is not satire, this is real. And, when all is said and done…we are in this mini- revolution in no small part because there are precious few reporters allowed to do their jobs.

The forces of accountability have failed.

So what exactly do the people want? What are they mad about?

Well, ain't that just the beauty of it? No one is selling one-liners based on malarkey. These occupiers have been subject to propaganda for so long, swallowing phrases like "war on terror" they began to feel that, alongside the reporters mouthing war slogans, they too were recruiting for a way of life they do not want.

The Occupier's remember the Main Stream press they counted on as recently as ten years ago. That press warned and protected them. Today much of the Main Stream media corporations are owned by the entertainment industry or those who make weapons of war. In fact, making war, movies, and gossip is how these new media corporations came to be so rich. Firing the investigative reporters helped too…they were so expensive.

The forces of accountability have been replaced by media monopolies not that different from the financial monopolies of Wall Street.

If the "free press" was doing its job freely, it would have been nice to know which politicians were bought by whom, and how much more of the public's money the big wigs planned to take. Nice thought, but unlikely. The Fourth Estate is asleep and doesn't seem to be waking up…not until the corporations that own the reporters stop pushing their own agendas and start doing what is constitutionally directed of them. The media was part of the envisioned checks and balances. Its job was protecting the people and the planet from tyrants and thieves.

Clearly, we are witnessing that democracy does not work without a free press. The voiceless masses paid attention in elementary school when they were told they were the government…the people were the democracy. The occupiers know they haven't had much to do with anything, lately. Now, they are stepping back into their constitutional role as "the people."

Frankly, there has been so much dereliction of duty on the part of most Main Stream media---so much neglect---that there are more prisons than universities in this country. And few corporate owned reporters seem to be able to find their way to a school board meeting much less stumble upon a story of any value.

This speaks volumes. Does it not?

After years of neglect…the work now seems formidable. There is so much corruption collusion and pandering to one side or another…the public is finally taking to the streets. The "Occupy Wall Street" movement is fed up with the bait and switch that began in full force ten years ago. That's when it became unpatriotic to ask why. That's when it became "patriotic" to give up civil liberties. Unlike many in the Main Stream media, The People began to notice the more they gave up in the name of "national security", the less free they became. Just as Thomas Jefferson warned.

After ten long years of nodding and smiling under their belts, The People are not going along to get along anymore. Now, if only the press would follow.

The current corporate media is working for the least patriotic, most self-interested, callow, mean spirited, polluting, plundering corporations imaginable. These are the "corporate people" who parceled out the republic. The reporters cannot report on them…they are them.

Now, "Occupy Wall Street" has become "Occupy America." Protestors are saying one thing loudly and clearly. Not so fast Bubba. Get your greedy hands out of our pockets.

It's about time too. Even so, there are very few reporters out covering this "Occupy" movement with any respect.

As a consequence, those on the street are not being heard and likely to make their voices louder.

For old time reporters, used to putting boots on the ground and trying to tell all sides, the most dangerous places were the communities where people were used, treated like peasants, and thrown away.

What happens when the majority of a country in a so called democracy feels unrepresented? We should remember, America's revolutionaries of 1776 desired not much more than a monarch off their backs, and if they paid their taxes, a seat at the table of discussion. Certainly sounds familiar does it not?

America is waking up.

Many in these rallies have no jobs, little hope for the future, and see a government, political system and mass media in bed together.

It's a very unholy trifecta. People with nothing to lose are the most dangerous people on Earth.

fry-day chill

Crap-O-CRACK-Down!!

Then They Fight You

Friday 28 October 2011

by: William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed

Occupy Oakland protesters after their camp was destroyed by Oakland police along with ten neighboring police departments.  Several hundred protesters regrouped at the intersection of 14th and Broadway where police tried dispersing the crowd with tear gas, flash bang rounds, rubber bullets and bean bag shots. (Photo: ekai)

The national standoff between authorities and protesters in the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement has reached a new and dangerous level of tension and violence.

At first glance, it looked like something out of Pink Floyd's film 'The Wall': menacing images ofcreatures in gas masksswarming toward the camera under a dark and forbidding sky. This was no dystopian fantasy, however; these were members of the Oakland police departmentcharging into a group of protesters behind a wall of tear gas, flash-bang bombs, rubber bullets and bean-bag projectiles. The police bull-rushed these unarmed protesters with the intention to do violence, and violence is exactly what they did.

As of this writing, one woman is known to have been seriously injured when a flash-bang grenade went off right by her head. She was seen being carried away unconscious from the scene of the police riot by other protesters. Anther known injured protester has a name, and a face, and a record of service to his country. Scott Olsen, a Marine veteran of two Iraq tours, was participating in the Occupy Oakland protest when he was shot in the head by a ‘less-than-lethal’ police projectile, suffered a fractured skull, and was taken to the hospital in critical condition. His condition has since been upgraded to fair.

Welcome home, Marine. Thank you for your service to your country, but since you dared to exercise your First Amendment right to peaceable assembly, here's a cracked head for your trouble. And you thought Iraq was dangerous.

According to Oakland officials, the justification for this eight-hour-long explosion of force was that the area being occupied by protesters had become unsanitary, and that people were being raped within the camp zone. This was news to those who had been peacefully occupying the space in front of Oakland's city hall. It sounded suspiciously familiar to some last-decade claims about weapons of mass destruction being justification for a different burst of violence, and smells just as bad. The extreme nature of this police action might have had more to do with the fact that the protester's camp was unofficially named Oscar Grant Plaza, after the unarmed citizen who was murdered in 2009 by BART transit police, an incident that was caught on camera and broadcast to the world. Maybe the Oakland police did not like the reminder, and so swung their truncheons with an excess of vigor.

This is not the first example of excessive violence being directed at protesters in the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement. A number of incidents directed at unarmed, non-resisting protesters in New York City have been documented in detail, and in one case, an official inquiry into one NYPD officer's use of pepper spray is ongoing. The scene that played out in Oakland could very well have taken place several days ago in New York, had Mayor Bloomberg not made the wise, last-minute decision to back down from his demand that Liberty Park be cleared of protesters so it could be "cleaned." A number of protesters were injured by police in San Francisco and Denver, as well.

What happened in Oakland in the hours between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, however, is a definite escalation of tensions between protesters and authorities, and seems to indicate those authorities are edging closer and closer towards unleashing the dogs of war on people who offer no violence and pose no threat to anyone other than the financial power-brokers who have so thoroughly ravaged this country's future.

It goes without saying that not every person participating in these national actions are docile lambs; every movement, no matter its political denomination, is going to have its share of idiots and adrenaline-junkies. Within the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement, however, these types of people make up so small a fraction of the main as to be negligible...but they do offer authorities a nice excuse to bulldoze the whole movement, and it makes you wonder how many of these so-called agitators are running around causing trouble with a badge in their back pocket. Beyond agitators, there is the simple fact that not everyone is going to react like Gandhi when they get gassed, pepper-sprayed, flash-bombed, clubbed and shot with projectiles for peacefully assembling to point out a grievous wrong.

'Occupy Wall Street' is about saying "No."

"No" to institutionalized greed of such vast width and breadth that it plunders our country even as it smiles around a mouthful of filet mignon.

"No" to the ocean of corporate cash that drowns our democracy.

"No" to rewarding the failure of frauds who proudly carry the banner of capitalism even as they enjoy the galloping socialism of the government bailout.

"No" to those who refuse to hire new employees because they want to screw over the economy and remove a president they don't like. But it is also about so much else.

The ‘Occupy’ movement is as diverse and multifaceted as the cities and towns where it has been happening. More often than not, local issues are at the forefront of the protester’s concerns; Wall Street is local for New York City, but in Oakland, the protest has been geared more toward halting austerity measures and the closures of schools and libraries…and, yes, police violence. Yet even as every ‘Occupy’ community has its own set of priorities, it is all part of a single continuum, as the issues being protested all stem from the same core concerns that crashed the economy, and created the movement, in the first place.

'Occupy Wall Street' is not about getting into a public crunch with cops over whether or not tents should be allowed in a public park. Rather than react with violence to people who are sacrificing themselves to point out what has gone so terribly wrong with the America we all love, these authorities should take a step back and encompass the awesome fact that such a movement has become so very necessary in the first place.

They should remember that violence is the last refuge of the desperate, that violence directed towards these protests will only make them stronger, and will put a big, bloody underscore beneath their efforts. Every punch thrown by a police officer, every protester clubbed or gassed or bombed or shot down with a riot-control projectile, only proves the point of that protester, and invigorates the entire movement.

They should remember that this is the year 2011, and every single person gathered at these protests has a phone with a camera that will make any unnecessary or egregious act of official violence an instant media sensation. These authorities are not working in the dark, not by a long chalk. One protester with a steady hand will make an over-the-top cop famous in all the wrong ways in exactly as much time it takes to read this sentence. Enough footage like that, and matters will escalate quickly indeed. The whole world is, in fact, watching.

Every police officer dealing with these 'Occupy' protests is not a frothing mad dog, any more than every 'Occupy' protester is a brick-throwing terrorist. Police in Albany recently refused an order to clear out a group of 'Occupy' protesters, a decision that was roundly praised. But if the Battle of Oakland shows us anything, it is how quickly this can get out of hand. The protesters are not going anywhere, and if they are met with violence on the order of what took place Tuesday night, there is no telling where we will find ourselves in the end.

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Crap-A-Fracker !!

Environmental activist 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

photo: 

Santa Clara University

The Fracking Industry's War on the Truth

By Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Reader Supported News

20 October 11

The fracking industry's war on The New York Times - and the truth.

Superb investigative journalism by the New York Times has brought the paper under attack by the natural gas industry. That campaign of intimidation and obfuscation has been orchestrated by top-shelf players like Exxon and Chesapeake, aligned with the industry's worst bottom feeders. This coalition has launched an impressive propaganda effort carried by slick PR firms, industry-funded front groups and a predictable cabal of right-wing industry toadies from cable TV and talk radio. In pitting itself against public disclosure and reasonable regulation, the natural gas industry is once again proving that it is its own worst enemy.

I confess to being an early optimist on natural gas. In July of 2009, I wrote a widely circulated op-ed for the Financial Times predicting that newly accessible deposits of natural gas had the potential to rapidly relieve our country of its deadly addiction to Appalachian coal and end forever catastrophically destructive mountaintop-removal mining. At that time, government and industry geologists were predicting that new methods of fracturing gas-rich shale beds had provided access to an astounding 2,000-5,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in the lower 48 - enough, they claimed - to power our country for a century.

These rich reserves might have allowed America to mothball or throttle back our 336 gigawatts of mainly antiquated and inefficient coal fired electric plants, replacing them with underutilized capacity from existing gas-generation plants. That transition could reduce US mercury emissions by 20%-25%, dramatically cut deadly particulate matter and the pollutants that cause acid rain, and slash America's grid-based CO2 by an astonishing 20% - literally overnight! Gas could have been a natural companion for wind and solar energy with its capacity to transform variable power into base load, and could have been a critical bridge fuel to the new energy economy rooted in America's abundant renewables.

(Read More)

Crap-O-Shock-Shut !!

 

If the Greeks can shut their country down, why can’t we?

by Eric Stoner | October 19, 2011, 4:29 pm

In an effort to stop Greece’s parliament from voting for further austerity measures today and tomorrow, the Greek people have effectively shut the entire country down, as part of the 48-hour general strike. As Time reports:

The strikes have shuttered government offices, public services, shops and even bakeries. Taxi drivers walked off the job, as did air-traffic controllers (though they shortened their work stoppage from 48 hours to 12).

Unfortunately, as has been common in past demonstrations in Greece, some protesters broke windows of storefronts and clashed with the police, throwing rocks and molotov cocktails at them.
Despite the many images of such violence, Theodora Oikonomides, a Athens resident who was at the enormous rally today at Syntagma Square told theGuardian that:

A group of between 20 and 40 people, really no more, then started throwing stones. I recognised some of them from previous events. They never seem to get arrested.

From footage of the clashes, her estimate seems to be far too small, but most reports have said that the group engaging in violence was a small minority of what was an otherwise peaceful strike and rally.
The Associated Press is now reporting that the vote this evening went in favor of the further austerity measures, but the bill will not be passed until its articles are voted on tomorrow.
As I watch the Greeks give everything they’ve got to stop this legislation from going through, I couldn’t help but wonder why protests in the US haven’t attempted a general strike, which is one of the most powerful nonviolent tactics.
While there were citywide general strikes during the Great Depression, like the1934 general strike that shut down San Francisco for four days, a true nationwide general strike to my knowledge has never been either attempted or successful in this country.
Yes, the United States is a much larger country both geographically and numerically, which would make organizing such an action more challenging, but if Greece can pull it off, why can’t we?
If the Occupy Wall Street movement is eventually to put the kind of pressure on the government and corporate power to truly address the structural problems with our economic and political systems, a serious nationwide general strike that clearly demonstrates who actually makes this country tick may be called for.

San Fran Sat. PM Breeze

CraP-a-worldly-Word !

Links Between Climate Change and Increased Social Unrest Unacknowledged

Friday 14 October 2011

by: Michael Busch, Truthout | Interview

 

The thundercloud-like effect of smoke from a wild fire. (Photo: Greg Seitz / Flickr) ==>>

In many respects, 2011 has been marked as much by the mayhem of nature as it has by the upheavals of men. Although challenges to political authority have captured the imaginations of millions and produced exciting tremors of revolution across the continents, Mother Nature's increasingly ferocious response to the heavy environmental footprint of industrial production will likely be judged the most profound source of social change around the world in the years to come….

(Read On)

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Crap-o-Drone-Kill-Zones!

Covert Drone War

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/

Grim milestone as 300th CIA drone strike hits Pakistan

October 14th, 2011 | by Chris Woods | Published in All Stories, Covert Drone War

 Over 2,000 mourners attended the funeral of Maulana Iftiqar, 
the head of a local religious school 

The United States ‘covert’ drone war in Pakistan reached a new milestone today with the 300th attack on alleged militants in the country’s tribal areas, according to research by the Bureau.

Just before dawn on Saturday, CIA drones struck a housing compound in Angor Adda, South Waziristan. Up to six alleged militants died in the attack with at least three injured.  The casualties were linked to local militant commander Maulvi Nazir. He is viewed as hostile by the US because of militant attacks inside Afghanistan, despite his having a long-standing peace deal with Pakistan.

Analysis: Who killed Anwar al Awlaki – and why?

The CIA attack is the fourth in Waziristan in 48 hours.  On Friday more than 2,000 mourners attended the funeral of Maulana Iftiqar, the head of a local religious school – and reported jihadist – killed in a strike the day before.  A local politician told the assembled mourners that ‘America should realise that these attacks are causing hate against it, and see these thousands of people who are here to attend funeral of a martyr.’

CIA drone strikes on Pakistan are occurring at a frequency of one every four days

Three hundred strikesThe Bureau has now identified 300 drone strikes since June 17 2004. Of these, 248 have occurred during President Obama’s three years in office, rising to a frequency of one strike every four days.

According to a detailed analysis of the attacks, at least 2,318 people have been killed in the CIA campaign, the majority of them alleged militants.

Related article: Call for all casualties of conflict to be properly recorded 

But among them at least 386 civilians – and as many as 775 – have reportedly died, the Bureau’s investigations show, including more than 170 children. And more than 1,100 people have been reported injured.

In Numbers: CIA drone strikes in Pakistan

Total reported killed      : 2,318 – 2,912

Civilians reported killed : 386 – 775

Children reported killed : 173

Total reported injured    : 1,141- 1,225

Total strikes                   : 300

Obama strikes               : 248

Denial

The CIA itself recently admitted to killing 2,050 people with its drones – all but 50 of them combatants – after the Bureau published its database in August. Despite substantial evidence published by the Bureau of civilian deaths caused by its strikes, the US continues to claim that it has killed no ‘non-combatants’ in Pakistan since May 2010.

Related article: Over 160 children reported among drone deaths

The Bureau’s data is drawn from reputable sources such as AP, Reuters, the New York Times and credible Pakistani media. It is also cross-referenced where possible against leaked US intelligence documents and diplomatic cables; the writings of academics, politicians and former intelligence officials; pending legal cases; and some commissioned field work in Waziristan. The full methodology can be found here.

Iain Overton, the Bureau’s managing editor said: ‘With 300 strikes now recorded in Pakistan, the CIA’s drone strikes mark a major front in the US war in the region. Yet officially the US will not even acknowledge this programme. The need for scrutiny has never been higher.’


(go to the original site)