Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC) - sponsor of HCR 107

HCR 107 is a resolution of impeachment against Obama, based on the President’s history of circumventing Congress in launching wars of aggression, as well as Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s recent testimony that Obama doesn’t require constitutional authority to wage war.

Presidential candidate Ron Paul, as well as several moderate Republicans, have signed on as cosponsors.

If progressives are at all serious about ending government by corporation and preserving the last vestiges of our Constitutional government, they need to cut the umbilical cord to the Democratic Party once and for all and support the Republicans in this effort.

HCR 107 is currently in front of the judiciary committee. We all need to lobby the Republicans on the committee (they hold the majority) to hold hearings. It will be interesting how many of them are serious about getting their boy Mitt into the White House. As I see it, this is the only strategy that gives him a shot at it. I am also curious to see what excuses I suspect some of them will give for not upholding the Constitution. We need to make sure they get well-publicized.

Here’s the full text of the Resolution of Impeachment: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.CON.RES.107:

Here are the contact details for the members of the House Judiciary Committee: http://judiciary.house.gov/about/members.html

If you live in a Republican District, you should also contract your congressional representative and ask them to sign on as a cosponsor. Forget the Democrats. Kucinich is the only one with enough integrity to support this.

(If the above video fails to play, view it here:  NBC Chicago)

According to the National Lawyers Guild, the Chicago police have begun unlawfully detaining activists in anticipation of the protests planned at the NATO summit on June 22nd.  They have been breaking down doors without warrants and detaining them without charge. Read more here: Chicago cops start preemptive arrests

Someone needs to let the Chicago authorities know that NDAA is no longer the law of the land, not since a brave federal judge, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Forrest declared it unconstitutional. Naomi Wolfe has an excellent article about this major victory in the Guardian.

Prime Minister Wen Jia Bao with President dos Santos

(This is the second of two blogs contrasting US and Chinese foreign policy in Angola and other oil-rich African countries.)

The Angolan civil war ended in 2002 with one million dead, four million permanently exiled and a country rich in natural resources littered with landmines and crumbling infrastructure. The MPLA government was left with the daunting task of clearing landmines, rebuilding the decimated infrastructure, retrieving weapons from a heavily-armed civilian population and resettling tens of thousands of refugees who had fled the fighting. Eduardo dos Santos, who has been president for more than 30 years, remains immensely popular, with the MPLA winning an 82% majority in the 2008 election, the second in Angolan history.

In addition to underwriting Angola’s oil industry, low interest Chinese loans and investment have helped fund mineral prospecting in the country’s copper, iron and gold mines, as well as financing landmine clearance necessary to re-establish coffee and cotton plantations. Now that oil revenues are no longer needed to purchase armaments and pay government troops, they are used for national reconstruction projects – roads, airports, bridges, hospitals and schools. Angolan refugees in their millions once clamored for admission to Portugal. Now the reverse is happening. With Portugal in severe recession, more than 10,000 Portuguese natives emigrated to Angola last year, in search of business and employment opportunities.

Extreme Income Inequality

The Angolan middle class is doing great. The Porsche dealer in Luanda, the capitol city, can’t keep up with orders. Ironically Angola was also in the unique position of having 4G mobile access ahead of most of Europe and much of the US. The government partnered in this venture with the Chinese phone giant ZTE. The latter provided all the equipment, including the handsets, and most of the installation engineers.

Unfortunately the majority of the Angolan people has yet to benefit from the economic boom. Seventy percent of the population still lives below the poverty line. Half the country lives on less than $2 and one-fifth of all children die before their fifth birthday (though this number has improved significantly with the end of the civil war).

The Angolan “Arab Spring”

Unita, the official opposition in Parliament, complains bitterly that the ruling party silences any and all criticism. In 2011 a group of young Angolans, influenced by the “Arab Spring” movement, protested in the capital demanding Santos’ resignation. Their protests were quickly and forcefully put down by the Angolan police. Dos Santos also receives unfavorable publicity about human rights abuses in Cabinda province, home to a separatist movement that predates the civil war. Much of the country’s oil wealth comes from Cabinda. Human rights groups allege that Angolan troops deployed there have committed civilian atrocities.

Given the CIA’s historic links with Unita, their historic opposition to the MPLA and the role of CIA-funded foundations, such as National Endowment for Democracy (NED), United States Agency for International Development, and Center for Applied Nonviolent Strategies (CANVAS) in funding and training other “Arab Spring” activists (see Smoking Gun: US Role in Arab Spring, it’s hard to believe the CIA doesn’t have their sticky fingers in Angola’s “Arab Spring,” as well. The Agency also finds separatist movements hard to resist, especially those in regions suitable for cocaine or heroin trafficking (as in Kosovo and Balochistan – see Our CIA Freedom Fighters in Pakistan).

It may be pure coincidence that Angola is a growing transshipment hub for Nigerian traffickers transporting Brazilian cocaine to Nigeria or Europe.

Portuguese president Passos Coelho with President dos Santos

(This is the first of two blogs contrasting US and Chinese foreign policy in Angola and other oil-rich African countries.)

Forget China and India. The World Economic Forum predicts that six of the ten most rapidly growing economies in 2012 will be on the African continent. Both Ghana and Nigeria have exceeded China as the fastest growing economies in the world. Based on GDP growth for the first quarter of 2012, the Ghanaian economy will grow by 16^% this year. The Nigerian GDP, which dropped to 3.4% in 2010-2011 is expected to hit 10% in 2012. Nigeria’s dip in economic growth related in part to the global financial crisis and in part to investor jitters over the militant environmental movement in Ogoniland, where most Nigerian crude is produced. Shell’s shameless production practices have led to massive coastline degradation, air pollution and health problems. The Ogoni people, who receive no employment or other economic benefits from Shell’s exploitation of their most valuable resource, are understandably angry. There is the additional and related problem of massive “bunkering” (illegal diversion of oil from the Shell pipeline), with total loss amounting to 7% of Nigeria’s total oil production.

While GDP growth in Angola isn’t expected to reach the top ten (they are only expected to grow by 10%), the country has become an even bigger magnet for foreign investment than Ghana or Nigeria. Moreover, like Nigerian president Jonathan Goodluck, their president Eduardo dos Santos has committed to help bail out the floundering Eurozone (the latter by helping their former colonial master Portugal).

The two main features all three countries share is a flourishing oil export industry and generous low interest Chinese loans. The latter has allowed them to develop their respective oil industries while simultaneously escaping the treacherous clutches of the IMF, World Bank and western investment banks.

US vs Chinese Foreign Policy in Africa

Here once again we see the stark contrast between US and Chinese foreign policy. Ever since African colonies began to win independence, the US has opted for covert and overt military intervention to destroy African infrastructure, thereby suppressing nationalistic struggles that might threaten the economic interests of US oil companies and their stockholders. China, in contrast, has embarked on a long term investment/development strategy that offers immediate economic and infrastructure support for countries devastated by years of western economic exploitation and civil war – and significant long term investment returns for the Chinese economy. In hindsight, US taxpayers would clearly have benefited more if the Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton and Obama administrations had opted for a Chinese-style development/investment strategy in Africa. It’s a great pity we were never given a choice or even told the truth about Africom and the US military agenda in Africa.

The US media would have us believe that Africa is still a famine stricken backwater of warring tribes incapable of getting along with one another. This is extremely ironic, given that most of the civil wars that have plagued the continent – and the resulting famines – were the direct result of CIA destabilization campaigns, often involving mercenaries funded and trained by the CIA and/or our NATO allies.

Angola’s 27 Year CIA-Sponsored Civil War

Recently there has been special focus on Angola, as April 4^th was the ten year anniversary of the country’s 27 year civil war. Angola already had a well-established oil export industry when they first gained independence in 1975. Their big mistake was installing a nationalist government determined to use their oil wealth to improve the lives of ordinary Angolans. The same scenario, of Big Oil against freedom and self-determination, played out here as in the Middle East. The main US foreign policy objective there was to suppress Arab nationalism. With the support and encouragement of the US, South Africa’s apartheid regime invaded Angola to overthrow the new government, run by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola). When Cuba sent fighters to support the government, the CIA intervened by funding and training Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), a rival group led by Jonas Savimba. This, in turn, led to Soviet intervention on the side of the Angolan government.

After 16 years of fighting, which killed up to 300,000 people, a peace deal led to elections. But Unita rejected the outcome and resumed the war, killing an additional hundreds of thousands of Angolans. Another peace accord, backed by UN peacekeepers, was signed in 1994 and the UN. As the fighting steadily worsened, the peacekeepers withdrew in 1999. Subsequent concerns about a link between the civil war and the unregulated “blood diamond” trade led the UN to freeze bank accounts used in the gem trade.

The death of Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in a gunfight with government forces in February 2002 led the rebels to sign a ceasefire in April which ended the conflict.

To be continued.

Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness (2011)

Film Review

The term “economical relocalization,” which has been around about four years, describes the global movement of loosely knit Transition Towns and other grassroots networks working to strengthen local and regional economies and systems of food and energy production. I myself was unacquainted with the term until I came across it in the promotional materials for the Economics of Happiness. Most of the last six years of my life have been focused on grassroots relocalization activities. For four years, I helped run a local mutual credit system (an alternative monetary system allowing people on a fixed income to purchase goods and services from each other). During the same period, I have been a strong and vocal supporter of New Plymouth’s farmers’ market, as well helping to start a local community garden. Along with a group of local energy engineers and other members of Grey Power, I also (successfully) lobbied New Plymouth District Council to promote and support locally produced “distributed” energy (for example local wind farms and grid-connect solar electricity) systems.

What I like best about Economics of Happiness is learning I am part of a global movement to strengthen local communities economically and politically. What I dislike most is the title, which suggests the film relates in some way to New Age spirituality. I have found books and films that smack of New Age touchy-feeliness are often a turn-off for blue collar activists.

The 2011 film, narrated by Helena Norberg Hodge, is based on her 1991 book Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh and her 1993 film by the same name. The book and both films draw their inspiration from the nearly forty years Norberg-Hodge has spent living and working in Ladakh, a small Himalayan region in the India-controlled (and disputed) state of Jammu and Kashmir. The beginning of Economics of Happiness includes footage from the 1993 film. It also includes substantial documentary footage on the global economic crisis and the impending global ecological crisis, a consequence of runaway climate change and mass species extinction.

In addition to examining extreme weather events, mass unemployment, extreme income inequality and skyrocketing energy and food costs, the Economics of Happiness also focuses on “the crisis of the human spirit.” It doesn’t do so from a religious or New Age perspective. Instead it looks at the epidemic level of loneliness, alienation and demoralization that seems to accompany wholesale industrial globalization.

The Psychological Devastation of Globalization

The film opens with the same narrative Norberg-Hodge recounts in her earlier Ancient Futures film. We are shown the “before” image of Ladakh, a rich thriving culture in which residents live in large spacious homes, enjoy respectable amounts of leisure time and have no concept of unemployment. Then we have the “after” image where, thanks to globalization, cheap (government subsidized) food, fuel and consumer goods that have flooded the region and destroyed most residents’ traditional livelihoods. Previously pristine communities face rising levels of air and water pollution, while Ladakhi teenagers are continuously bombarded with consumerist messages.

It’s heartbreaking to see the psychological effect of all this. Most young Ladakhi have come to regard themselves as backwards and poor, while the communities they live in face rising racial tensions, juvenile delinquency and epidemic levels of psychological depression.

The Destructive Nature of Urbanization

The film goes on to sketch the mechanics of globalization, stressing the deregulation that forces small self-contained regions like Ladakh to open their markets to foreign goods, which quickly supplant higher priced local products. Norberg-Hodge paints an even uglier picture of urbanization, an inevitable result of forcing millions of small formers off their land. In discussing the growing global scarcity of fossil fuels, water and food, she stresses that life in a large city is vastly more resource intensive than rural living. All city residents rely on food, energy and water transported from some distant source, while they burn up additional fossil fuels transferring their waste products as far away as possible. She stresses that most city residents tend to go along with the massive ecological and social devastation their lifestyle produces because they don’t see it. The damage often occurs on the other side of the world.

Rebuilding Local Communities and Economies

The solutions Norberg-Hodge offers for all these problems are similar to those proposed by an increasing number of “latter day” economists. First and foremost we must acknowledge that humankind has exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity – that the corporate drive for continual economic growth must end. Secondly people of conscience need to opt out of corporate economy to facilitate the creation of more efficient and environmentally accountable regional and local economies. In addition to transitioning to local energy and food production, people need to exert collective pressure to break up large investment banks and replace them with local retail banks and credit unions. State and local governments need to stop giving subsidies and tax breaks to large corporations and start supporting their own local businesses. Not only do small businesses create the vast majority of jobs, but they don’t pack up after a few years to move to overseas.

Norberg-Hodge also sees this process of rebuilding local communities as the only way to address the “crisis of the human spirit.” She believes the latter is a direct result of the demise of community engagement that has accompanied globalization and urbanization.  Although the process is most striking in remote regions like Ladakh, where it occurred suddenly, no region of the developed or developing world has escaped it.

The film ends on an extremely optimistic note, with numerous examples of international and community organizations supporting people in reclaiming their lives from multinational corporations.

Charles Eisenstein

Sacred Economics

Charles Eisenstein

2011  Evolver Editions

Book Review – Part II

This review is divided into two parts. The second half covers some exciting solutions Eisenstein proposes for our broken economic system in Part II: The Economics of Reunion and Part III: Living the New Economy.)

The only weakness of Sacred Economics are some mistaken and contradictory assumptions Eisenstein makes about Marxism. He makes it really clear in Part I that capitalism needs to be replaced, but not in a “Marxist” way that removes any monetary incentive for people to produce goods and services that are useful to the community. In later chapters, he contradicts himself by arguing for the restoration of the gift economy, in which people are rewarded with public recognition, status and esteem for their contributions to the community. That being said, Einstein clearly believes that violent revolution to dismantle capitalism is unnecessary. He makes the case that major economic change can be accomplished through gradual evolution, pointing out that the process as already started via the global economic relocalization, Open Source and Creative Commons movements.

Eisenstein proposes to base his new “Sacred Economy” on the creation of local commons-based “negative interest” currency, something that worked very successfully during the Great Depression in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and a relocalization of economic and political power to cities and regions and away from central government.

Negative interest money was first proposed by Delvio Gisell in 1906 in his book Natural Economic Order. Gisell called it “free money” because it allowed people to exchange goods and services without paying interest to the owners of money (banks) for the right to do so. A negative interest system involves “demurrage” or natural decay in the value of money. If you know that a $100 bill will only be worth $90 in a year’s time, you have a powerful incentive to stimulate the economy by exchanging it for goods and services.

In the 1920s a negative interest currency called the Wana circulated in Germany. Towns that used the Wana had plenty of money for business expansion, workers salaries and public infrastructure and services – in contrast to towns that relied on the Deutschmark, which owing to deflation, was in extremely short supply. Austrian and Swiss communities introduced negative interest currencies (the Worgle and the WIR) in 1932. Owing to the threat these alternative curries posed to banks and wealthy elites, the German and Austrian governments banned the Wana and the Worgle in 1932-33. The WIR is still in circulation in Switzerland but no longer operates as a negative interest currency. During the post-World War II boom, the demurrage was eliminated to prevent the Swiss economy from overheating.

In the US more than 100 cities were preparing to launch demurrage currencies – to stimulate local communities ravaged by the Great Depression – when Roosevelt came to power in 1932. Roosevelt, who recognized the enormous threat this posed to central government, banned all “emergency currencies” by executive decree (as Thaddeus Russell writes in A Renegade History of the United States, Roosevelt set the dangerous and unconstitutional precedent of circumventing Congress to enact laws by executive order).

The main advantages of commons-based negative interest currency are

1. Money ceases to be scarce. As it becomes easier for small businesses to access money, jobs are created and people resume purchasing goods and services. Because the new currency is commons-based (see below), higher prices for ecologically harmful products serve as a brake their production.
2. The ready availability of money eliminates the fear of never having enough, reducing greed to acquire more, one of the main causes of income inequality.
3. Debts become easier to repay. People only pay back the original loan, without the compound interest.
4. There ceases to be any incentive for corporations to convert natural resources to profit, as cash profits rapidly decline in value.
5. Banks have more incentive to fund ecologically and socially productive projects with a low rate of return. They lose less by lending negative interest money than by allowing it to accumulate.
6. As money loses its value and importance, there is gradual resurrection of both the gift economy and the commons, in which people work for a “social dividend” in the form of public recognition. Eisenstein sees this process already beginning with the thousands of volunteers who donate their time to create and upgrade Open Source software, Wikipedia and books, films, songs and blogs they share freely as part of the Creative Commons.

The Relocalization of Economic and Political Power

Eisenstein would like to see all local, regional and state governments issue commons-backed currencies to stimulate local business development and job creation, just as the Wana, Worgle and WIR did during the Great Depression. He applauds Ellen Brown’s work in campaigning for publicly owned state banks. At present. seventeen states have introduced legislation to create publicly owned state banks funded by interest free tax revenue rather than Wall Street. The latter would be in an ideal position to issue negative interest complementary currency.

How a Commons-Based Currency Would Work

Rather than being backed by gold or silver, Eisenstein proposes that these local negative interest currencies work like bearer bonds and be redeemable for the right to deplete the commons. Businesses could use them, in other words, to purchase the right to create an agreed amount of pollution or to deplete an agreed amount of a natural resource. Because these pollution/resource depletion quotas would be extremely expensive, corporations would be forced to internalize” (i.e. absorb the cost) of environmentally harmful production, rather than “externalizing” it (and making the public pay) as they do currently.

New Zealand economist Deirdre Kent has also proposed using land to back locally created negative interest currencies. Under her proposal, local government would issue negative interest vouchers as a “loan” to prospective home buyers. The vouchers could be used to repay these “loans,”  pay property taxes (known as “rates” in British commonwealth countries ) or purchase goods and services from local businesses.This would offer new home buyers a far cheaper alternative than a bank mortgage, as well as discouraging property speculation, stimulating local businesses and producing additional revenue for local government.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition

Charles Eisenstein

2011,  Evolver Editions

(This review is divided into two sections. The first covers Part I: The Economics of Separation, describing the history of money and capitalist economics. The second half covers some intriguing fixes Eisenstein proposes for our broken economic system in Part II: The Economics of Reunion and Part III: Living the New Economy.)

Book Review – Part I

The title Sacred Economics makes Eisenstein’s book sound like a New Age treatise on spirituality. The book is actually about the end of capitalism. It offers an extremely well-researched discussion of the history of money, capitalist economics and the world wide movement for economic re-localization. The main focus of Part I is an exploration of the profound effect money has on human thinking and psychology. Eisenstein is most concerned about the illusion of separateness and of scarcity. Both, he argues, are mistaken beliefs that can be traced back to the privatization of communally owned land, an early consequence of the introduction of money.

Owing to his determination to avoid simplistic clichés about greedy corporate CEOs and amoral banksters, Eisenstein arrives at some startling conclusions. By tracing the western conception of money back to its earliest origins in ancient Greece, he makes a strong case that the money system itself is responsible for rapacious growth and resource depletion, greed and the demise of community.

How Money Destroyed the Gift Economy

The book begins by describing the gift economy that has characterized all primitive cultures. Public gift giving was a major social ritual in all early societies. It was the primary mechanism early human communities employed to satisfy basic survival needs. As civilizations became more complex, gift exchange and barter were impractical over long distances. Thus money was introduced as a common medium of exchange. Because money also represented stored value, it also had a profound effect on our perception of ourselves, other human beings and society.

The Illusion of Scarcity

An early artifact of the introduction of money was the mistaken belief that the basic necessities of life are in short supply. This illusion underpins all western economic theory. In fact many textbooks define economics as the study of human behavior under conditions of scarcity. As Eisentein points out, this is a ludicrous notion in a world in which vast quantities of food, energy and raw materials go to waste He links the illusion of scarcity to the illusion of the “discrete and separate self.” This, in turn, stems from the concept of personal wealth and the privatization of communally owned land. Prior to Roman times, land, like air and water, was considered part of the commons and couldn’t be owned. Under Roman tradition, there was no way for an “individual” (a Greek invention related to the concept of money and personal wealth) to legitimately take possession of common lands. Thus the Roman aristocracy must have seized it by force, just as the English stole the communally owned lands of Native Americans.

During the many centuries our ancestors had access to communal lands for their herds and crops, they enjoyed a sense of interconnectedness and interdependency. This was lost when the wealthy began fencing it off as private property. Many sociologists believe this loss of interconnectedness has left all of us with a fundamental inner emptiness we experience as never having enough.

The Origin of Greed

Eisenstein attributes greed to this illusion of scarcity. He can see no other explanation for the extreme generosity of poor people (according to numerous studies), in contrast to the wealthy. Low income people give away far more money, relative to income, than their rich contemporaries. Studies also show that rich people worry much more about money than anyone else. This, in turn, makes them even more inclined to perceive scarcity when none exists. Einstein talks about the immense anxiety people in rich countries experience over “financial security.” No matter how much they accumulate, it’s never enough.

Debt, Usury and Perpetual Growth

Sacred Economics argues that what economists commonly refer to as growth is the expansion of scarcity into areas of life once characterized by abundance. Fresh water, which was once abundant, has become scarce following its transformation into a commodity we have to pay for.

The fractional reserve banking system, which allows bankers to create money out of thin air – as debt – accentuates the pressure to convert more and more of the commons into commodities. Because the debt and interest created is always greater than the money supply (current global debt is estimated at $75 trillion, in contrast to global wealth of $30 trillion), there is always constant pressure to create more goods and services to repay it. This explains why there are always people willing to cut down the last forest and catch the last fish.

Extreme wealth inequality occurs because economic growth is always lower than the rate of interest. When debtors can’t make interest payments by producing new goods and services, they are forced to turn over more and more existing wealth to creditors.

As natural resources, such as fossil fuels, minerals, forests, fish and water, are rapidly converted to commodities, a similar transformation occurs in the social, cultural and spiritual commons. Stuff that was free throughout all human history – stories, songs, images, ideas, clever sayings – are copyrighted or trademarked to enable them to be bought and sold.

According to Einstein, the main reason for the world’s current financial crisis is that we continue to face mountains of increasing debt – yet have run out natural, cultural, social and spiritual capital we can convert to money to repay it.

To be continued, with a discussion of some of Eisenstein’s novel solutions.

(from http://www.yourbofa.com/)

Dear Fellow American,

Welcome to your Bank of America.

Today, it’s time to acknowledge that our Bank isn’t working anymore—not just for the market, but for people, our real customers. We’ve paid $8.58 billion in relief to borrowers and $3.24 billion in fines. We face lawsuits and claims from citizens, companies, and state and local governments. There is even a petition with the Federal Reserve to break up our bank, adding yet more uncertainty to our position. Finally, we’ve found ourselves front-and-center in the national foreclosure crisis, and deep in unpopular investments like coal, at a time when climate change is a growing societal concern.

As a result, our company’s shares have fallen precipitously, and now trade at one-fifth their 2008 price. Our Bank may, in fact, soon need help keeping afloat—and much as in 2008, you, the American taxpayer, will be asked to provide that assistance.

The institutions you rescued in 2008 have continued much as they always were, engaging in the same practices that brought our economy so close to collapse. To make sure that this time around, things turn out differently, we at Bank of America are launching a forum in which you, the American taxpayer, can prepare for the time that you own us. By sharing ideas, and reading and rating the ideas of others, you can begin charting a course for this Bank—your course.

And when the day comes that you, the American taxpayer, own this Bank, you will be ready to make it a Bank for America—one that brings benefits not to the privileged only, but to all of our customers, and to all of our stakeholders too.

Welcome to your Bank of America.

Brian T. Moynihan
Chief Executive Officer
President

Brought to you by the same naughty men who produced the film The Yes Men

Go to www.bofa.com to share your ideas how our new bank should be run.

Location of US Drone Bases

Is there a secret plan to evacuate some residents of Chicago in the event of major trouble during the NATO summit next month? CBS 2 has uncovered some evidence that there is. It comes from the Milwaukee area branch of the American Red Cross.

CBS 2 News has obtained a copy of a Red Cross e-mail sent to volunteers in the Milwaukee area.

It says the NATO summit “may create unrest or another national security incident. The American Red Cross in southeastern Wisconsin has been asked to place a number of shelters on standby in the event of evacuation of Chicago.”

Read more here: Milwaukee Red Cross Told To Prepare for Chicago Evacuation

Editorial comment: Condominium owners in the protest area have also received notices to evacuate. What exactly is Obama planning? A drone strike on the protestors? He has already given himself the authority to label people he doesn’t like as terrorists and assassinate them.

In January, Congress passed legislation opening up the US sky to domestic unmanned drones for military and police purposes (i.e. to monitor peaceful protests).  Drones patrolling the Canadian border have been spotted in Spokane.

Is there a secret drone base in your neighborhood? Here’s a website where you can check:

FAA forced to reveal 63 domestic launch sites in US

Still under house arrest, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange discusses the experience of solitary confinement with the new president of Tunisia.  President Marzouki offers him asylum. Fascinating interview on RT: