hands up don't shoot

Killer Cops Boost Body Count in War on Black America – Glen Ford

“Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the Old World, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, …

Pine Lawn PD

Cops in this Small Town have 35,000 Open Arrest Warrants, That’s 26 Warrants per Citizen!

If you want to know what a corrupt police state of revenue collecting, citation addicted bureaucrats look like, look in Missouri. A recent report showed that there were 23,457 arrest warrants pending in Pine Lawn Municipal Court in St. Louis County. That’s about 7.3 per resident. However, Pine Lawn is far from the worst. The town of Country Club Hills has over 35,000 …

big-brother-watching

U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades

The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed. For more than two decades, the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed logs of virtually all …

Obama withholding

Obama’s NSA Reforms, One Year Later

In February, the Director of National Intelligence issued a report summarizing the changes that President Obama has implemented since pledging major surveillance reforms in January 2014. The report chronicles a dizzying number of developments and contains links to several hundreds of pages of supporting documentation. But does this impressive accumulation of activity translate to meaningful reform? The report makes clear that the big picture …

Is Flawed Terrorism Research Driving Flawed Counterterrorism Policies?

More than thirteen years after the U.S. intelligence community named the prevention of terrorism its number one goal, it seems to have little understanding of what drives terrorism, or how to counter it. And, if the recently increasing criticism is correct, the government’s investment in academic terrorism research isn’t helping. It may be because the government is continuing to fund research supporting discredited theories of terrorist radicalization, rather than objective empirical analyses. After …

prison_industrial_complex

Boycott, Divest and Sanction Corporations That Feed on Prisons

All attempts to reform mass incarceration through the traditional mechanisms of electoral politics, the courts and state and federal legislatures are useless. Corporations, which have turned mass incarceration into a huge revenue stream and which have unchecked political and economic power, have no intention of diminishing their profits. And in a system where money has replaced the vote, where corporate …

police

Obama Chooses Six Cities to Test Federal Police Scheme

Under the guise of “restoring trust” between communities and police departments that have been militarized by the federal government, the Obama administration’s Justice Department announced this month that it had selected six U.S. cities to serve as pilot sites, to develop and deploy federal guidance for local police to create better procedures, reduce racial bias, and regain citizens’ trust. The plan, which is …

texting while driving

Texting bans tied to drop in car crash injuries

Most U.S. states now have bans on texting while driving, and those laws may be preventing some serious traffic accidents, a new study suggests. Researchers found that car-crash hospitalizations dipped in states that instituted relatively strict bans on texting and driving between 2003 and 2010. Overall, the hospitalization rate in those states declined by 7 percent versus states with no bans, the researchers report …

Pentagon

The Pentagon’s Scourge of Global Militarism

Next to secret warfare, new militarism has involved a selected range of major and overt “quickie” interventions…  Western militarism constitutes, next to climate change and poverty, the world’s greatest scourge. As internationally acclaimed Canadian academic Michel Chossudovsky has pointed out, NATO’s aggressive expansion into Eurasia and the Middle East has brought about the possibility of a “World War Three scenario.” Since …

police

THE BIGGEST THREAT TO AMERICAN LIBERTY

George Washington pointed out, “Overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty. Wise words by the father of our country, but ones, unfortunately, rejected by modern-day Americans, who love and idolize the enormously overgrown military establishment that now characterizes our federal governmental system. …