NDAA on trial: Obama Administration fights ban on indefinite detention of Americans

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Aug 13, 2012 by RTAmerica

White House lawyers have been recently defending the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA. They have been arguing that jailing Americans indefinitely without trial in some instances is necessary for the safety and security of the country.Tangerine Bolen of Revolution Truth and a plaintiff in the case against the NDAA joins RT’s Kristine Frazao to discuss the matter.

Criminalizing Dissent by Chris Hedges

by Chris Hedges
Featured Writer
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Truthdig
August 13, 2012

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I was on the 15th floor of the Southern U.S. District Court in New York in the courtroom of Judge Katherine Forrest on Tuesday. It was the final hearing in the lawsuit I brought in January against President Barack Obama and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. I filed the suit, along with lawyers Carl J. Mayer and Bruce I. Afran, over Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). We were late joined by six co-plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg.

This section of the NDAA, signed into law by Obama on Dec. 31, 2011, obliterates some of our most important constitutional protections. It authorizes the executive branch to order the military to seize U.S. citizens deemed to be terrorists or associated with terrorists. Those taken into custody by the military, which becomes under the NDAA a domestic law enforcement agency, can be denied due process and habeas corpus and held indefinitely in military facilities.

Saving the Post Office: Letter Carriers Consider Bringing Back Banking Services by Ellen Brown

by Ellen Brown
Featured Writer
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webofdebt.com
August 12, 2012

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On July 27, 2012, the National Association of Letter Carriers adopted a resolution at their National Convention in Minneapolis to investigate establishing a postal banking system.  The resolution noted that expanding postal services and developing new sources of revenue are important to the effort to save the public Post Office and preserve living-wage jobs; that many countries have a successful history of postal banking, including Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United States itself; and that postal banks could serve the 9 million people who don’t have bank accounts and the 21 million who use usurious check cashers, giving low-income people access to a safe banking system.  “A USPS bank would offer a ‘public option’ for banking,” concluded the resolution, “providing basic checking and savings – and no complex financial wheeling and dealing.”

Tim A. Wise: The Drought and the Coming Food Price Bubble

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Aug 13, 2012 by TheRealNews

Tim A. Wise: US food reserves at an historic low as biofuels, climate change and speculation exacerbate food crisis.

Overview: The Bubble and Beyond by Michael Hudson

by Michael Hudson
Featured Writer
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http://michael-hudson.com
August 10, 2012

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The Road from Industrial Capitalism to Finance Capitalism and Debt Peonage

Essays on Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation and the Global Crisis

Michael Hudson’s new book The Bubble and Beyond can be purchased here.

Preface

Summary and Analytic Table of Contents

A New Dust Bowl? by Chris Williams

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Chris Williams, author of Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis, argues that the drought gripping the U.S. can’t be separated from climate change.
SocialistWorker.org
Aug. 6, 2012

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MORE THAN 50 percent of counties in the United States are now officially designated “disaster” zones. The reason given in 90 percent of cases is the continent-wide drought that has been devastating crop production. Forty-eight percent of the U.S. corn crop is rated as “poor to very poor,” along with 37 percent of soy; 73 percent of cattle acreage is suffering drought conditions, along with 66 percent of land given to the production of hay.