Source: http://www.gocomics.com/patoliphant#mutable_700289

Department of Justice Balks at Turning Over Guantanamo Detainee’s “Power-of-Attorney” Document to His Lawyers
Friday 28 October 2011
by: Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

Attorneys for Abu Zubaydah say they have been trying to mount a meaningful defense for the “high-value” detainee, who has been in the custody of the US government since March 2002, and have also sought legal remedies outside of the United States to hold accountable those who were complicit in his rendition and torture.

But Zubaydah’s attorneys claim their efforts have been stymied by the Justice Department (DOJ), which refuses to turn over to them critical documents they need to press forward with his case.

For example, late Thursday, Zubaydah’s legal team filed a lawsuit against Lithuania with the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), the leading human rights tribunal in the world, over the country’s failure to reopen an investigation into its role in Zubaydah’s rendition to a CIA black site prison in Lithuania and the torture he was subjected to there in 2005.

Read more.

The following is an excerpt from H.W. Brands’ Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered the World and Threatened Civilization As We Know It, out this month from University of Texas Press.

MCM

I.

The currency’s grip on the world economy is rapidly slipping — and that could mean bad things for us
The end of the dollar standard
BY H. W. BRANDS
http://www.salon.com/2011/10/06/the_end_of_the_dollar_standard/

II.

Exclusive: China to step up ASEAN yuan trade settlement

(Reuters) – China plans to sign an agreement with the 10-member Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to settle trade in yuan, said two independent sources, another step in China’s long campaign to make its currency one widely used beyond its borders.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/20/us-china-economy-yuan-idUSTRE79J2JR20111020

The American way of bombing?
Derek Gregory, 27 October 2011

‘Signature targets’ are ghostly traces of the ‘target signatures’ that once animated the electronic battlefield. Commentators have often drawn comparisons between the wars in Vietnam and in Afghanistan, but if Vietnam was a ‘quagmire’ then the air wars over Afghanistan-Pakistan threaten to create a vortex. See the Closing Session of the Shock and Awe conference.

About the author: Derek Gregory is Peter Wall Distinguished Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He is completing a new book, The everywhere war.

The problems with remote-controlled warfare are legion. The human operator ‘is terribly remote from the consequences of his actions; he is likely to be sitting in an air-conditioned trailer, hundreds of miles from the area of battle.’ He evaluates ‘target signatures’ captured by various sensor systems that ‘no more represent human beings than the tokens in a board-type war game.’

The rise of this new ‘American way of bombing’, as it’s been called, has two particularly serious consequences. First, ‘through its isolation of the military actor from his target, automated warfare diminishes the inhibitions that could formerly be expected on the individual level in the exercise of warfare’. In short, killing is made casual. Secondly, once the risk of combat is transferred to the target, it becomes much easier for the state to go to war. Domestic audiences are disengaged from the violence waged in their name: ‘Remote-controlled warfare reduces the need for the public to confront the consequences of military action abroad.’

Read more.

I.

II.

Wisconsin Capitol to allow guns
Walker policy would allow weapons on Assembly floor
By Patrick Marley and Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel
Oct. 26, 2011
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/capitol-to-allow-concealed-weapons-assembly-to-allow-them-on-the-floor-132656308.html

III.

Where and how will people pack guns in Wisconsin’s Capitol? Some clues
October 28, 2011
By bluecheddar
http://www.bluecheddar.net/2011/10/28/where-and-how-will-people-pack-guns-in-wisconsins-capitol-heres-some-clues/

Many investment managers support Occupy Wall Street
By Jim Kim

Are you a closet supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement?

Some of you undoubtedly are. I recall talking to someone in a fairly high position in a pharmaceutical company as the health care debate unfolded. He was quite conflicted about some of the positions championed by his industry. In the vast financial service empire, we can’t assume that everyone will blindly support the marquee banks.

Read more.

Wall Street is Still Out of Control, and Why Obama Should Call for Glass-Steagall and a Breakup of Big Banks
By Robert Reich

Next week President Obama travels to Wall Street where he’ll demand – in light of the Street’s continuing antics since the bailout, as well as its role in watering-down the Volcker rule – that the Glass-Steagall Act be resurrected and big banks be broken up.

I’m kidding. But it would be a smart move — politically and economically.

Politically smart because Mitt Romney is almost sure to be the Republican nominee, and Romney is the poster child for the pump-and-dump mentality that’s infected the financial industry and continues to jeopardize the American economy.

Romney was CEO of Bain & Company – a private-equity fund that bought up companies, fired employees to save money and boost performance, and then resold the firms at a nice markups.

Read more.

Source: http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/10/26/354133/alabama-immigration-law-library-card/

ALABAMA LIBRARY REQUIRING PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP FOR LIBRARY CARD | Even library visitors have not been spared from Alabama’s extreme anti-immigrant law, HB 56. Since Sept. 1 (before the law went into effect), the North Shelby County Library has asked people who want a library card to prove their legal status or citizenship. The president of the library’s board of directors defended the decision, saying, “We have to follow the rules that all businesses must follow.” The library is considered a public corporation but operates as a nonprofit after the state legislature created the district in 1988, so it possibly falls under a provision in HB 56 that bans business transactions between the state and undocumented immigrants. While it does not compare to not being allowed to have water in your home or even losing your home just for being an undocumented immigrant, it is another unnecessary headache caused by Alabama’s unconstitutional immigration law.

First Tuesdays Political Series:
Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos

Tuesday, Nov. 1
7:00 p.m.
McNally Jackson Bookstore
52 Prince St. (b/t Lafayette & Mulberry) NYC

Mark Crispin Miller hosts Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos. From Africa to Asia and Latin America, the era of climate wars has begun. Extreme weather is breeding banditry, humanitarian crisis, and state failure. InTropic of Chaos, investigative journalist Christian Parenti travels along the front lines of this gathering catastrophe–the belt of economically and politically battered postcolonial nations and war zones girding the planet’s midlatitudes. Here he finds failed states amid climatic disasters. But he also reveals the unsettling presence of Western military forces and explains how they see an opportunity in the crisis to prepare for open-ended global counterinsurgency. Parenti argues that this incipient “climate fascism”–a political hardening of wealthy states– is bound to fail. The struggling states of the developing world cannot be allowed to collapse, as they will take other nations down as well. Instead, we must work to meet the challenge of climate-driven violence with a very different set of sustainable economic and development policies.

***

Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (Hardcover)
Interview with Christian Parenti
By Michael Busch, September 29, 2011

Christian ParentiIn many respects, 2011 has been marked as much by the mayhem of nature as it has by the upheavals of men. Although challenges to political authority have captured the imaginations of millions and produced exciting tremors of revolution across the continents, Mother Nature’s increasingly ferocious response to the heavy environmental footprint of industrial production will likely be judged the most profound source of social change around the world in the years to come.

>From the Japanese tsunami, which triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, and the extreme drought that currently threatens the lives of millions in the Eastern Horn of Africa to the wildfires, hurricanes, and periodic flooding that have decimated both coasts of the richest country in the world, anthropogenic climate change is increasingly—and undeniably—at the core of politics and society everywhere in the world.

Tropic of Chaos, Christian Parenti’s excellent new book examining the intersections between climate change, neoliberal economic policy, and the spread of political violence, argues that the convergence of these threats to international security has set our world along a course that will result in a broken planet characterized by catastrophe, conflict, and xenophobic distrust. That is, unless meaningful action is taken immediately to reorient international relations away from this disastrous trajectory.

Read more.