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Apr 12, 2012
Focus: Civil Rights
Action Request: Protest
Location: United States

This is a copy of an article from "Z Magazine".

      Color Lines.com forwarded their concern about voting rights. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, as many as five million eligible voters could meet difficulties on Election Day 2012 due to new, imposing voter laws. [FIVE MILLION FORMERLY-ELIGIBLE VOTERS!!!!!] There are currently eight states with photo voter ID laws containing specific criteria for what qualifies as "identification" for voting purposes. Some states require that identification be state-issued and only for the state a person is voting in; some prohibit college IIDs; some demand that the full name and address on the card be current; while others require that an ID card has an expiration date. 

      Looking at those stipulations, it's not hard to imagine how low-income citizens, African Americans, Latino Americans, college students, and elderly voters might get tangled up or turned away on voting day.

      The Center estimates that as many as 11 percent of eligible voters lack proper identification right now. For African Americans, it's 25 percent. Other groups like Native Americans, transgendered people, newly divorced, newly married couples or people who've recently lost their homes could all have information on their drivers licenses that reflect names, address, and faces that aren't current. The costs for these groups will be more than an inconvenience: fees for new birth and marriage certificates, hours lost waiting in lines for updated materials, and transportation costs to handle it all.

      Republicans in state legislatures around the country have tried to pass these laws for years. In 2010, when Republicans not only took over Congress, they became majorities in state legislatures across the country, one of the chief items on their agendas was changing the rules of the voting game. An example is Tennessee, which for the first time since the Civil War saw its House of Representatives, Senate, and governor's office all controlled by Republicans. They quickly passed new voter ID laws and last year made headlines when a 96-year-old African American was denied an ID to vote.

      A great deal of funding comes from the Koch Brothers, who've vowed to remove President Obama from the White House by any means and billions of dollars if necessary. Another player is ALEC -- the American Legislative Exchange Council -- a body that includes banks and corporations working alongside Republican legislators to craft laws that would dismantle not only voter rights, but also environmental and labor protections.

      The states are perverting and exploiting civil rights laws in order to pretend that racial discrimination has been completely eradicated. Some even point to the election of the first black president and the record turnout of voters of color in 2008 as evidence that no traces of discrimination are left in the system. Instead, they claim to trace voter fraud to "people voting with the names of other displaced, deceased, or fictionalized voters" and argue this is why voter IDs are needed.

      All the data shows that instances of voter fraud are negligible at best. The voter fraud argument is in many cases a ploy to disguise the racial animus that fuels the voter ID push as well as to keep "illegal immigrants" from voting.

     

     

  

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Posted: Apr 12, 2012 1:08pm
Jun 9, 2007
Focus: Peace
Action Request: Other
Location: United States

Pentagon Restricting Testimony In Congress Blocks Staff Of Lower Rank

 May 10, 2007 By Bryan Bender, Boston Globe Staff [Excerpt]

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents.

The guidelines, described in an April 19 memo to the staff director of the House Armed Services Committee, adds that all field-level officers and enlisted personnel must be "deemed appropriate" by the Department of Defense before they can participate in personal briefings for members of Congress or their staffs; in addition, according to the memo, the proceedings must not be recorded.

REPLY:

Anyone who has served in combat in the armed forces of the United States has the right to say anything anytime to anybody, no exceptions whatsoever.  Someday, we will make that so again, as it used to be. 

The soldiers who served in 1776 elected their officers and did not hold their tongues.  Of course, that was a revolutionary army fighting an army of occupation. 

Which is, among other reasons, why we won.

The Pentagon idiots who came up with this one really know how to take an indefensible position in order to insure their opponents counterattack with redoubled ferocity.  

Gee, that sounds like Bush and Rumsfeld designing Iraq.

FYI, the publication does not print a comment or letter without taking off the writers IDs, if the writer is serving in the armed services that is, unless the writer wants to be publicly known.

That's to insure there is no harassment whatsoever for writing in. 

Respect for your service,

Do you have a friend or relative in the service?  Forward GI Special along, or send us the address if you wish and we’ll send it regularly.  Whether in Iraq or stuck on a base in the USA, this is extra important for your service friend, too often cut off from access to encouraging news of growing resistance to the war, inside the armed services and at home.  Send email requests to address up top or write to: The Military Project, Box 126 , 2576 Broadway, New York, N.Y. 10025-5657

CONTACT:

contact@militaryproject.org

DOWNLOAD ORGANIZING TOOLS HERE:

http://www.militaryproject.org/resources/

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Posted: Jun 9, 2007 1:39am
Apr 26, 2007

[This is from Eva Cox's blog.
NOW we know why Federal Prosecutors who weren't Bushies, were fired!]

Here's a very interesting website called the MadCow Morning News, which is featuring many, many stories on the real truth behind the seizure of a DC9, which was busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine in the Yucatan, and there are lots of juicy tidbits of information on the REAL PLAYERS, some of them you will notice as soon as you see their names. The name of the article is Dusty and 'the boys': The CIA, Narco Republicans, 5.5 Tons of Cocaine.

The beauty of this series of articles is that they are being presented on the one-year anniversary of the bust of this plane. You will be very surprised to learn of who is involved, and you will immediately notice that one of the prosecutors who was prosecuting a certain Congressman in San Diego, Carol Lam, was fired by Alberto Gonzales. Hold onto your seats, because this one will keep you mesmerized while you read it. Below is an excerpt, and I have borrowed this post from one of my friends on another website, who, I'm sure, will not mind me passing it along to interested parties here on Yahoo:

EXCERPT:

WORLD EXCLUSIVE
April 24 2007
by Daniel Hopsicker

The first anniversary of the April 10 2006 seizure in Mexico's Yucatan of an American-registered DC9 caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine passed virtually unnoticed last week. It shouldn't have...

Porter Goss resigned less than a month later, the same day the FBI executed a search warrant at the house of the No.3 official in the Central Intelligence Agency, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, soon to go on trial for corruption with accomplice Brent Wilkes.

Not since the downing of a C-130 military cargo plane over Nicaragua in 1986 with Eugene Hasenfus onboard, kicking off the Iran Contra Scandal, has an aviation incident been remotely as important or as fraught with significance.
And not since the massive cocaine smuggling through Mena, Arkansas has the CIA's hand been so flagrantly caught in the cookie jar.

In a series of stories beginning today, and continuing over the next ten days, the MadCowMorningNews

will report the results of a year-long investigation into the secret history of this operation.

Some of the highlights include:

· SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL., the company which owned the DC9 airliner stuffed to the top of the overhead bins with cocaine, was a CIA front.

· SkyWay's genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency.

· SkyWay was part of a network of companies, three of which, L-3 Communications, Net Command Tech Inc, and Triton Network Systems Inc., were cited by Elliot Spitzer, then the Attorney General of New York State, for being used by Wall Street brokers in "pump and dump" schemes which cost unwary investors tens of millions of dollars.

· The suspicious involvement of L-3 Communications subsidiary Titan Corp of San Diego, the biggest donor to Southern California Congressmen convicted or being investigated by fired San Diego U.S. Attorney Carol Lam.

· The Israeli connection to SkyWay, including the involvement of an Israeli tele-com firm, Tadiran, accused of being involved in worldwide espionage, and which owned the headquarters of SkyWay in Clearwater, Florida.

· The involvement of Gulf Arab financiers, including an overseas bank, Banque Francaise de l'Orient, long associated with the Saudi bin Laden family.

· Evidence of Republican party involvement in the network, which included the free use of one of the smuggling aircraft by the current head of fund-raising for the national Republican party, U.S. Senator Mel Martinez, who "traveled to nighttime rallies in luxury," the St. Petersburg Times reported, "on a DC-9 owned by Skyway Global, a Clearwater security company whose owners are Martinez supporters."

Still more shocking details

Over the next ten days, we'll present evidence for each of these heady claims, and attempt to find the answer to what is still a major mystery:

Why haven't U.S. authorities arrested the owners of an American-registered plane busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine?

The story began here:

The drug trafficking operation was flying an airliner carrying 128 suitcases...but no passengers. There was no attempt to camouflage their activity.

Mexican soldiers unloaded the American-registered DC9, whose cargo consisted of 128 identical black suitcases stuffed with cocaine, onto the hot asphalt runway in Cuidad del Carmen, an out of the way airport nestled in the middle of the Yucatan jungle.

In what may have been someone's idea of a joke, each suitcase bore a stamp on its side, with the single word "Privado."

The DC9 sported a distinctive Seal on its fuselage: blue-and-white with gold trim surrounding an eagle clutching twin olive branches, making it virtually indistinguishable from official U.S. Government planes belonging to the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.

Even veteran plane-spotters were fooled.

http://www.madcowprod.com/04242007.html

Owners of Plane Seized with 5.5 Tons of Cocaine Include Tom DeLay Appointee, Florida Firm Royal Sons LLC


WORLD EXCLUSIVE
APRIL 17 2006--Venice,FL.
by Daniel Hopsicker


One of the two owners of the DC9 (tail number N900SA) busted at an airport in Ciudad del Carmen in the state of Campeche, Mexico last week freighted 5.5 tons of cocaine had been appointed in 2003 to the Business Advisory Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee by then-Congressional Majority Leader Tom Delay, The MadCowMorningNews can exclusively report.

http://www.madcowprod.com/04182006.html









    
 
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Posted: Apr 26, 2007 12:31pm

 

 
 
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BMutiny TCorporationsEvil
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