There is a massive campaign underway to “turn on the pumps” and deliver additional water to corporate agribusiness in the western Central Valley. Agribusiness interests and their allies claim environmental and water activists care more about fish than people and are demanding more water, now!

Corporate agriculture’s campaign is being run by Burson-Marsteller (B-M), the astroturfing Public Relations firm that has been hired by the California Latino Water Coalition. MSNBC talk show host Rachel Maddow, in a March telecast, called B-M “the PR firm from hell” and said it had been hired to improve the “image” of AIG, the company that has received $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money. B-M has also represented the private security firm Blackwater, Union Carbide in the Bhopal India incident, and Babcock & Wilcox, manufacturers of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Read More

Even the most optimistic Obama supporter should cringe in response to the White House’s recent “bi-partisan immigration talks.” What could Democrats and Republicans possibly have in common over immigration? Quite a lot it turns out. An enormous sell-out is being prepared for the U.S. immigrant population and Latinos especially — who came out in record numbers in many swing states to vote for Obama last year. Attached to these votes are huge expectations.

Workers charged Rite Aid with abusive and illegal treatment at the company's annual meeting

Veteran Rite Aid employee Angel Warner from the company's massive million-square-foot distribution center in the high-desert community of Lancaster, California, stood up for employees at the company's annual meeting.

Casinos are cool places, but in the wrong places, too close to communities, they can be a bad thing. Casino Free Philadelphia is fighting to keep a casino from opening right on Market St.

A Committee of Outside Agitators, write: "On September 24-25th, leaders from the 20 richest and most powerful economies of the world will assemble in Pittsburgh, PA to discuss how they can further entrench their power in the face of the most devastating global depression seen in the last 70 years. We will meet them there."

A decade ago, tens of thousands of people converged in Seattle, Washington to protest the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. Directly confronting some of the planet's most powerful corporations, governments and security forces, those activists made history by successfully derailing the WTO's expansionist agenda.

Today, we find ourselves in the midst of the worst economic and environmental crises in generations. The same corporate interests activists confronted in Seattle are attempting to exploit these crises in order to concentrate their own power. We need to fight back. It is time to reclaim the "Spirit of Seattle," come together as affected communities and take control over the policy decisions that affect our economic and ecological well-being.

Aviva Chomsky is a professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts, and is a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from a Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia.

By Linden Gawboy

This last week both the towns of Gates and Chili voted to turn control of public access over to Time Warner. Greece, although they do not post their agenda before the time of the town board meetings, is expected to follow suit this Tuesday, June 16th.

Here is what citizens will no longer get if Time Warner becomes the provider:
1) There will be no local facility for the creation of public and governmental access programs, no studio and no studio equipment. Residents will effectively be disenfranchised.
2) There is no equipment such as video cameras available for loan to residents to tape programs and no editing equipment for residents to produce their own programs and shows.
3) There will be no full time staff to assist and advise residents. No one to answer calls and questions and to help facilitate local public programming. The question of scheduling programs on the people's channel is unclear. There will also be no staff to provide community service and outreach or to do video recording of local community events.

On Tuesday June 16, 2009 at 6:00pm, come out to the Greece Town board meeting and defend the people’s station. If we do not speak up now, it might be your town or city next.

Additional Information: Time Warner to renew push for internet caps

Despite the rain on Wednesday morning, several intrepid activists picketed outside Halton Cat on Columbia Boulevard in Northeast Portland. The small, but spirited group of protesters held the action in solidarity with the national day of action against Caterpillar, timed to coincide with the company's annual shareholder meeting.

Friday, June 12 was the second scheduled Free Speech march demanding an end to the recent wave of police dispersals(by force) of unpermitted street marches. This being Pride weekend, queer liberation was the chosen theme, with a focus on targetting "corporate Pride"... Read More | Video via Youtube | "Pride" Wrapup in photos

Related: From Stone Wall on: Going back to go Forward The Childhood of the Revolution | Remembering the Stonewall Rebellion in this week's Socialist WebZine

Three young men were arrested protesting Senator Schumer's support for "free trade" agreements

Activists charge Schumer with complicity in the murder of dozens of indigenous Peruvians killed over the weekend in a wave of repression against indigenous people engaged in nonviolent protest against the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement. Peruvian President Alan Garcia has used the FTA as a pretext to institute new laws that usher in an unprecedented wave of extractive industries – expanding logging, oil and gas drilling, mining, and destructive agriculture into the Amazon Rainforest. Read More & Pics | Related from Los Angeles: Local Peruvians and Environmentalists Protest at LA Peruvian Consulate

While the Obama administration and the Treasury and the Fed are bulldozing funds into the coffers of the big banks, allegedly to get them to lend, the banks, from the largest to the smallest, are pulling back, afraid that borrowers will end up going bust on them--and with good reason, given the high and rising level of unemployment So much for economic stimulus efforts.

A CALL FOR A GLOBAL MOBILIZATION AGAINST THE G20 SUMMIT IN PITTSBURGH, PA., U.S. SEPTEMBER 24 AND 25, 2009 ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE – BUT WE MUST FIGHT FOR IT! BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE JOBS & SOCIAL NEEDS--NOT WAR AND GREED

After legal battles lasting nearly fourteen years, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has been forced to pay a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement. Plaintiffs from the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta have successfully held Shell accountable for complicity in human rights atrocities committed against the Ogoni people in the 1990s, including the execution of writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. The legal action is one of the few cases brought under the U.S. Alien Tort Statute that have been resolved in favor of the plaintiffs. The settlement includes establishment of a $5 million trust to benefit local communities in Ogoni.

A CALL FOR A GLOBAL MOBILIZATION AGAINST THE G20 SUMMIT IN PITTSBURGH, PA., U.S. SEPTEMBER 24 AND 25, 2009 ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE – BUT WE MUST FIGHT FOR IT! BAIL OUT THE PEOPLE JOBS & SOCIAL NEEDS--NOT WAR AND GREED

"This is a real victory for the citizens of Medford,” Holen said. “It just doesn’t make good sense that Wal-Mart should be allowed to create traffic gridlock near the South Gateway and dump the costs of fixing it all on the backs of the taxpayer."

Holen added, "I would also like to say that I was really deeply disappointed in the way the city SPAC treated MCRD and other citizens who testified before them on this Wal-Mart matter over the years. We were never treated with respect or common civility, and felt belittled by them. I hope that this decision will not only change the way the codes are interpreted, but will also serve to remind this Commission that it needs to treat all those who come before it, not just the developers and power brokers, with dignity and courtesy.

Over time, government ownership has declined as the business system has sought to occupy all space in which profits can be made. Thus, as the military budget has grown, in-house arms production has largely disappeared, displaced by the "contract state." The triumph of neo-liberalism and the parallel intensified class war has been associated with further "privatization," which has not only opened up more avenues for private profits, but also weakened the state as a potential agent of ordinary citizens.

Wall Street's mantra is that markets move randomly and reflect the collective wisdom of investors. The truth is quite opposite. The government's visible hand and insiders control markets and manipulate them up or down for profit - all of them, including stocks, bonds, commodities and currencies.

It's financial fraud or what former high-level Wall Street insider and former Assistant HUD Secretary Catherine Austin Fitts calls "pump and dump," defined as "artificially inflating the price of a stock or other security through promotion, in order to sell at the inflated price," then profit more on the downside by short-selling. "This practice is illegal under securities law, yet it is particularly common," and in today's volatile markets likely ongoing daily.

Con Edison is a clear example that the mentality of “privatization and deregulation” has to go. Since it consolidated its private monopoly of power distribution, it has not operated in order to provide New Yorker’s with the electricity they need at a reasonable price or to provide its workers with a decent salary and benefits. Instead, Con Edison operates with the good of its shareholders in mind. As a result, New Yorkers are scraping to pay their bills, employees are losing benefits, and the public is being endangered, while executives and stockholders’ wealth is on the rise.

[Political analysis by Chris Burnett. host of "Indymedia On Air” - Mondays, 3pm, KPFK 90.7 FM] - Shepard's choice to become an instrumental part in creating brand Obama, given his street level marketing style, often illegal, provided a legitimacy that was certainly needed by the Obama campaign. Seeing Obama on every street corner in soviet-style branding (read "pro worker, average guy, savior") was shocking precisely because of what Hedges describes as spectacle on the one hand, and the illusion of street cred provided by Shepard's style on the other.

I thought I was seeing Mao and Che everywhere, as though this was some populist uprising against the ruling class, against a cynically corrupt political class. Far from it. It *was* the ruling class inverting and misdirecting our anger in order to advance a corporatist political party and agenda. Genius. Horrendous. No doubt, it had a profound affect on all of our psyches. But "HOPE" should have read "HYPE" and "PROGRESS" should have read "REGRESS". It was the epitome of bumper sticker politics: immediate gratification, feel good symbolism; very consistent with our hyperactive, but shallow corporate culture. Full article: Shepard Fairey’s Obama by Chris Burnett

---

production:   archives by date | single feature archives | weekly archives

Brave New Films has initiated a new media campaign via YouTube and Twitter to combat union busting at Starbucks. According to Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz, if employees “believe in their hearts that management trusted them and treated them with respect...If they had faith in me and my motives, they wouldn’t need a union.”