Earlier today in Washington, D.C., George Clooney and other peaceful protesters, including Martin Luther King III and NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, were arrested by the Secret Service. Is this a fluke, or a part of the government’s crackdown on peaceful protest in the nation’s capitol and elsewhere?
(George Clooney has since been released by authorities.)
The other video (below) is from my appearance on cable news network RT yesterday in which I discuss the very real issue of government agencies misusing the provisions in HR 347 (not to mention Patriot Act abuses, as outlined by two Democratic Senators in The New York Times today) , which could have a chilling effect on peaceful protest both in D.C. and around the country.
Protest should not be criminalized, period. And if even a well-connected celebrity like George Clooney is at risk, what does that say about the protections the rest of us may (or may not!) receive?
I know what you’re thinking. 30,000 drones isn’t NEARLY enough. No? OK, let me guess again: Wait, is this real?
Answer: Yes, this is real.
As I explain in the above videocast, Congress approved a FAA modernization bill that includes some weird little surprises for the American people. One of those surprises is 30,000 drones over US skies by 2015; all the better to see you with, and hunt you with, my dear.
As pointed out in the video, the ACLU has major issues with sky robots conducting 24/7 warrantless surveillance over our own citizenry, and I have issues with it as well. Some in the blogosphere have speculated these drones will be equipped with “less than lethal” weaponry designed to disburse, and discourage, peaceful protest.
I would tell you to start an online petition or something, but a government this overtly aggressive and totalitarian doesn’t care about a Change.org petition or a Facebook group. Sorry.
Also, this dovetails nicely: As New York magazine and others reported yesterday, the Justice Department’s top man is now making the public argument that the U.S. government has the right to kill American citizens without trial or judicial review.
Let’s hope those 30,000 drones are only equipped with tasers and sound guns, and nothing more lethal. Either way, if you see one of these bastards in the sky, I’d take cover.
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About David Seaman: David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and is the host of The DL Show. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth…For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.
If you appreciate David’s brand of fearless, unfiltered truth, please support future reports by donating to his Kickstarter.
Following the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Greg Palast led a four-continent investigation of BP PLC for Britain’s television series Dispatches. From 1989-91, Palast directed the investigation of fraud charges in the Exxon Valdez grounding for Alaska Native villages.
Some deal. BP gets the gold mine and its victims get the shaft. And a few lawyers will get vacation homes — though they won’t be so stupid as to build them on the Gulf Coast.
On Friday night, the judge-picked lawyers for 120,000 victims of the Deepwater Horizon blow-out cut a back-room deal with oil company BP PLC which will save the lawyers the hard work of a trial and save the oil giant billions of dollars. It will also save the company the threat of exposing the true and very ugly story of the Gulf of Mexico oil platform blow-out.
I have been to the Gulf and seen the damage — and the oil that BP says is gone. Miles of it. As an economist who calculated damages for plaintiffs in the Exxon Valdez oil spill case, I can tell you right now that there is no way, no how, that the $7.8 billion BP says it will spend on this settlement will cover that damage, the lost incomes, homes, businesses and boats, let alone the lost lives — from cancers, fetal deformities, miscarriages, and lung and skin diseases.
Two years ago, President Barack Obama forced BP to set aside at least $20 billion for the oil spill’s victims. This week’s settlement will add exactly ZERO to that fund. Indeed, BP is crowing that, adding in the sums already paid out, the company will still have spent less than the amount committed to the Obama fund.
There’s so much corrosion, mendacity and evil here in this settlement deal that I hardly know where to begin.
So, let’s start with punitive damages.
I was stunned that there is no provision, as expected, for a punishment fee to be paid by BP for it’s willful negligence. In the Exxon Valdez trial, a jury awarded us $5 billion in punitives – and BP’s action, and the damage caused in the Gulf, is far, far worse.
BP now has to pay no more than proven damages. It’s like telling a bank robber, “Hey, just put back the money in the vault and all’s forgiven.”
This case screamed for punitive damages. Here’s just a couple of facts that should have been presented to a jury:
For example, the only reason six hundred miles of Gulf coastline has been slimed by oil was that BP failed to have emergency oil spill containment equipment ready to roll when the Deepwater Horizon blew out. BP had promised the equipment’s readiness in writing and under oath.
And here’s the sick, sick part. This is exactly the same thing BP did in the Exxon Valdez case. It was BP, not Exxon, that was responsible for stopping the spread of oil in Alaska in 1989. In Alaska, decades ago, BP told federal regulators it would have oil spill “boom” (the rubber that corrals the spreading stuff) ready to roll out if a tanker hit. When the Exxon Valdez struck Bligh Reef, BP’s promised equipment wasn’t there: BP had lied.
And in 2010, BP did it again. Instead of getting the oil contained in five hours as promised as a condition of drilling, it took five days to get the equipment in place (and that was done by the US Navy on orders of the President).
This was more than negligence: it was fraud, and by a repeat offender. Now BP is laughing all the way to the bank.
And there’s more. BP mixed nitrogen into the cement which capped the well-head below the Deepwater Horizon. BP claimed to be shocked and horrified when the cement failed, releasing methane gas that blew apart the rig. BP accused the cement’s seller, Halliburton, of hiding the fact that this “quick-set” cement can blow-out in deep water.
But, in an investigation that took me to Central Asia, I discovered that BP knew the quick-set cement could fail – because it had failed already in an earlier blow-out which BP covered up with the help of an Asian dictatorship.
The lack of promised equipment, the prior blow-out — it all could have, should have, come out in trial.
Think about it: BP knew the cement could fail but continued to use it to save money. Over time, the savings to BP of its life-threatening methods added up to billions of dollars worldwide. BP will get to keep that savings bought at the cost of eleven men’s lives.
Other investigators have uncovered more penny-pinching, life-threatening failures by BP and its drilling buck-buddies, Halliburton and TransOcean. These include bogus “blow-out preventers” and a managerial system that could be called, “We-Don’t-Care Chaos.”
As BP had no choice but to pay proven damages and conceded as much, what exactly are the lawyers getting paid for? (Don’t be surprised if the fee requests hit a billion dollars.)
How could these lawyers let BP walk away on the cheap? The judge picked the lawyers that would settle or try the case for the 120,000 plaintiffs. His Honor side-lined the legal “A-Team,” like Cajun trial lawyer Daniel Becnel, guys with the guts, experience and financial wherewithal to go eyeball-to-eyeball with BP and not blink. Welcome to Louisiana, oil colony.
So BP walks without the civil punishment that tort law and justice demand, grinning and ready to do it again: drill on the cheap with the price paid by its workers and the public.
But stopping a trial denies the public more than the full payment due: it denies us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
The President has just opened up the arctic waters of Alaska for drilling, has reopened the Gulf to deepwater platforms, and is fiddling with the idea of allowing the XL Pipeline to slice America in half.
So we need to know: Can we trust this industry?
Without a trial in the Deepwater Horizon case, we may never get the answer, never get the full story of the prior blow-outs, the fakery in the spill response system, and other profits-first kill-later trickery that bloats the bottom line of BP and the entire drill-baby-drill industry.
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For more on Palast’s worldwide investigation of BP and the industry in Central Asia, the Gulf, Alaska, and the Amazon, read his new book, Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates and High-Finance Carnivores, available via VulturesPicnic.org. You can read “Chapter 1: Goldfinger,” or download it, at no charge here.
Today is the first day of a new America, one in which United States citizens can be detained indefinitely without due process. To mitigate the outcry against the NDAA – mostly from the twittergentsia since the mainstream media has for the most part looked the other way – Obama offered up a last minute waiver before the bill came into effect at midnight last night.
However, the waiver itself is not law, merely a statement of intention, meaning future Presidents will not be bound by what it says. Furthermore, Obama seems to be playing a PR word game with this essentially meaningless bit of paper. The key word here is “requirement” – which is repeatedly used in the Presidential Policy Directive (18 times in total). This basically mean there isn’t a requirement to use military detainment, but they still can. Feel safer now? Thought not.
In the above clip from RT America, SG political contributor David Seaman discusses Obama’s recent tweaks to the NDAA, and what they really mean (if anything). – SG Ed, Nicole Powers
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About David Seaman: David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and is the host of The DL Show. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.
Above: Protester praying in front of St. Paul’s as Occupy London is being evicted.
Image courtesy of: @HeardinLondon
“The integrity, the maturity, and the far sightedness, and the fact that the occupiers are holding genuine, proper beliefs, has been vindicated in the court and that is an important step forward.”
– John Cooper QC
“Presently analysing events of tonight at #OccupyLSX. Who needs sleep!” It’s 3:26 AM GMT on Tuesday, February 28, 2012, and John Cooper, Occupy London’s chief legal advisor is awake, on Twitter, and on the case following the movement’s eviction from their marquee St Paul’s Cathedral base.
The eminent barrister and Queen’s Counsel has worked tirelessly to keep the protesters in situ since the occupation began on Saturday, October 15, 2011. The battle the occupiers faced was made all the more complicated by the provenance of the site they were camping on, which straddles land owned both by the Church of England and by the City of London Corporation (a unique and ancient semi-private municipal authority which governs London’s square mile financial district).
When the first tent was pitched, even the most optimistic of Occupiers couldn’t have predicted the encampment would remain in tact over four months later, so Occupy London’s ultimate eviction from St. Paul’s can hardly be considered a defeat. An early attempt to remove protesters was thwarted when the Cathedral’s then Canon Chancellor, Giles Fraser, recognized the occupiers’ right to protest peacefully and asked the police to leave. Fraser’s actions would ultimately lead to his resignation following some rather public infighting between Church officials with conflicting affiliations and agendas.
With the Church distracted by its own internal disharmony and facing a public relations nightmare if it litigated against members of the very congregation it was supposed to serve, the powers that be at St. Paul’s – at least publicly – stepped aside and let the City of London Corporation spearhead eviction efforts through the courts. Following a hearing before Christmas, the High Court ruled in favor of the City on January 18, 2012. The occupation was granted a stay of execution pending a possible appeal, however, on February 22, three Court of Appeal judges declined to give Occupy London protesters permission to do so, setting the stage for this week’s eviction.
SuicideGirls caught up with John Cooper by phone shortly before the final ruling came down. Having butted heads with the UK establishment throughout his career (notably frustrating the ruling class’s thirst for blood sport thanks to a fox hunting prohibition act he penned), Cooper says his raison d’être is representing individuals and groups of individuals against the power of the state. A series of cases brought against the Ministry of Defense on behalf of the families of soldiers who had died in the theater of war due to unconscionably inadequate equipment earned him the honor of being short-listed as Human Rights Barrister of the Year in 2009. More recently, Cooper again gained notoriety in the halls of power when he represented those seeking to open an inquiry into the mysterious death of David Kelly, a Ministry of Defense weapons inspector who had embarrassed his employers by pointing out inconsistencies in their report on Iraq’s WMDs (or lack thereof).
Here Cooper gives an account of Occupy London’s David vs. Goliath fight, and outlines the numerous victories they have chalked up in the face of defeat. He also pragmatically comments on the changes he’d like to see in the law to fortify the battered and beleaguered rights to assembly and free speech.
I go into further detail in my latest videocast, but here’s what you need to know about H.R. 347 at a glance: It’s outrageous, it’s atrocious, and it’s ludicrously un-American.
Oh, and it passed the House yesterday 388 to 3.
Here’s what foreign media is saying about the bill — in this case,
Russian state-owned news network RT:
Just when you thought the government couldn’t ruin the First Amendment any further: The House of Representatives approved a bill on Monday that outlaws protests in instances where some government officials are nearby, whether or not you even know it.
The US House of Representatives voted 388-to-3 in favor of H.R. 347 late Monday, a bill which is being dubbed the Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011. In the bill, Congress officially makes it illegal to trespass on the grounds of the White House, which, on the surface, seems not just harmless and necessary, but somewhat shocking that such a rule isn’t already on the books. The wording in the bill, however, extends to allow the government to go after much more than tourists that transverse the wrought iron White House fence.
Under the act, the government is also given the power to bring charges against Americans engaged in political protest anywhere in the country.
And here’s what our media is saying — in this case, Congressional news site The Hill:
Members approved the bill, H.R. 347, under a suspension of House rules, by a 388-3 vote. The non-controversial bill was subject to just a brief debate in the afternoon, seeing the easy vote.”
Oh, non-controversial. OK. Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along.
(Hat tip to the Reddit hivemind for The Hill and RT links.)
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About David Seaman: David Seaman is an independent journalist. He has been a lively guest on CNN Headline News, FOX News, ABC News Digital, among others, and is the host of The DL Show. Some say he was recently censored by a certain large media corporation for posting a little too much truth… For more, find him on G+ and Twitter.
SG Political Contributor David Seaman sits down with investigative journalist and author Greg Palast to find out what’s not so super about the unprecedented amount of funding being poured into politics by corporations and private individuals via the new breed of political action committees (PACs) created following the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Palast has made it his raison d’être to expose the vultures who prey on our political system for their own gain at the expense of the masses it’s supposed to serve. Here he explains why talk of corporate personhood is taking the focus off an aspect of campaign finance that could potentially be even more troubling. – Nicole Powers, SG Ed.
Check back here for Parts 2 and 3 of David’s interview with Greg tomorrow and Monday.
