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Last night, in a closely contested fight, Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat was filled by an anti-equality candidate with the backing of the National Organization for Marriage.
NOM used anti-gay rhetoric in thousands of “robo-calls” to turn out Massachusetts voters. And they’re sure to roll out similar tactics in their efforts to dismantle the victories we’ve already secured on marriage in Washington, D.C., New Hampshire and more.
We’ve got to fight back, and the final few hours in our campaign will be critical to providing the resources to do so. The response so far has been amazing – but we still haven’t reached our goal of 2,010 new members by tonight. Will you be one of them?
at 4:30 PM MST Marty Rouse, National Field Director at the Human Rights Campaign joins us to promote their NO EXCUSES campaign.
With just hours left in our most important fundraising drive of the year, we haven’t heard from you yet. I’m hoping you’ve just been waiting for the right moment to join HRC and accept a sleek metal water bottle – our gift for first-time members ONLY.
As National Field Director, Marty Rouse is tasked with mobilizing the Human Rights Campaign’s 650,000+ members to effect change at the federal, state, and local level. Before joining HRC, Rouse headed MassEquality, a coalition of organizations dedicated to defending marriage equality in Massachusetts. Rouse’s direction helped build MassEquality into one of the state’s largest and most powerful political groups – a national model that combined grassroots organizing with strategic electoral focus.
Rouse’s deep political and field experience also includes his work in Vermont to protect the pro-civil unions majority in the state Senate in 2000. He also served in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Clinton administration. Rouse and his civil union partner Scott Sherman are proud parents of their two sons Sasha and David.
At 5 PM MST Dahr Jamail returns !
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, (Haymarket Books, 2007).
Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.
We will discuss his recent articles Army Imprisons Soldier for Singing Against Stop-Loss Policy
And Army Files Charges Against Single Mother
Army Imprisons Soldier for Singing Against Stop-Loss Policy
by Dahr Jamail, January 10th, 2010 | T r u t h o u t: click HERE to hear Marc’s song of protest
Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on December 11, 2009, in Liberty County Jail, Georgia, for recording a song that expresses his anger over the Army’s stop-loss policy.
Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the end of their signed contracts. According to the Pentagon, more than 120,000 soldiers have been affected by stop-loss since 2001, and currently 13,000 soldiers are serving under stop-loss orders.
Hall, (aka hip hop artist Marc Watercus), who is in the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division, was placed in Liberty County Jail for the song (click here to listen to “Stop-Loss”, by Marc Watercus), in which he angrily denounces the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military.
Military service members do not completely give up their rights to free speech, particularly not when they are doing so artistically while off duty, as was the case with Hall. He is charged under Article 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which covers “all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline” and “all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces.” The military is claiming that he “communicated a threat” with his song. Hall mailed a copy of the song to the Pentagon after the Army unilaterally extended his contract for a second Iraq deployment. …
at 6 PM Dan Beeton, International Communications Coordinator at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Dan Beeton has over ten years of experience working on international policy issues with organizations including the Center for Economic Justice, Haiti Reborn, and the U.S. Campaign for Burma.
Prior to joining CEPR, he was associate director for Citizens Trade Campaign where he did research and advocacy on U.S. trade policy. Dan has studied and written extensively about Haiti.
Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story
…If the U.S. media have failed to cover the story of political instability in Haiti with the depth it deserves, it is certainly not the first time. In fact, it is the latest episode in a pattern of U.S. reporting on Haiti that has given many of the most important stories only a cursory glance. To get an idea of how and why this happens, I interviewed several U.S. journalists who have reported from Haiti, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity.
This is how one reporter describes some editors’ views on Haiti: “Everyone knows the place is a mess, so what are you going to tell me that’s new? What goes on there does not affect people in the U.S.” Such lack of editorial interest has led to a near total absence of coverage of some of the most shocking incidents of violence, including the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces, the Haitian National Police (HNP), and death squads.
The UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (Minustah), which began its mission in June 2004, has been marred by scandals of killings, rape, and other violence by its troops almost since it began. As has been documented by human rights investigators and declassified U.S. government documents, Minustah conducted a number of raids into Haiti’s slums—ostensibly to target armed gangs—that have repeatedly left scores of unarmed civilians dead.
In a now infamous case, Minustah mounted an assault into Cité Soleil, Haiti’s largest slum, on July 6, 2005. According to declassified cables sent that day from the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince to the State Department, UN troops fired 22,000 shots in seven hours in a neighborhood where most people live in structures made of flimsy sheet metal …
We spoke earlier with Melinda Miles, founder and Director of Konbit pou Ayiti, an aid and assistance organization based in Haiti. Melinda gives us her perspective: *direct* from her boots-on-the-ground aid relief & activism efforts in Haiti.
Established aid groups who have a long history of working in Haiti have suddenly found themselves unable to deliver urgently needed medical, water, and food supplies because the U.S. military will not grant them access to ports and airports. Doctors Without Borders reported yesterday that one of its “plane[s] carrying 12 tons of medical equipment, including drugs, surgical supplies and two dialysis machines, was turned away three times from Port-au-Prince airport since Sunday night.”
Groups ready to deliver aid to Jacmel – the fourth-largest city in Haiti – were told they would receive no clearance to land there from the U.S. military, even though they already had both aid supplies and the means for distributing them. This aid is only just now beginning to be delivered because of assistance from the Dominican Republic.
Aid groups also report that outside Port-au-Prince, there are places where quake survivors have fled where the infrastructure is capable of receiving airdropped aid. Many of these areas are not being utilized for airdrops, however.
National media reports and statements from officials suggest that U.S. and UN relief teams have delayed aid distribution due to security concerns. Yet Lt. General P.K. Keen, Deputy Commander of the U.S. Southern Command, reports that there is less violence in Haiti now than there was before the earthquake hit, and Doctor Evan Lyon of Partners in Health stated, “there’s also no violence. There is no insecurity,” and that the security concerns are being overstated due to “misinformation and rumors… and racism.”
You can donate directly to Melinda’s organization here
Haiti: An Unwelcome Katrina Redux
by Cynthia McKinney
President Obama’s response to the tragedy in Haiti has been robust in military deployment and puny in what the Haitians need most: food; first responders and their specialized equipment; doctors and medical facilities and equipment; and engineers, heavy equipment, and heavy movers. Sadly, President Obama is dispatching Presidents Bush and Clinton, and thousands of Marines and U.S. soldiers. By contrast, Cuba has over 400 doctors on the ground and is sending in more; Cubans, Argentinians, Icelanders, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and many others are already on the ground working–saving lives and treating the injured. Senegal has offered land to Haitians willing to relocate to Africa.The United States, on the day after the tragedy struck, confirmed that an entire Marine Expeditionary Force was being considered “to help restore order,” when the “disorder” had been caused by an earthquake striking Haiti; not since 1751, 1770, 1842, 1860, and 1887 had Haiti experienced an earthquake. But, I remember the bogus reports of chaos and violence the led to the deployment of military assets, including Blackwater, in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. One Katrina survivor noted that the people needed food and shelter and the U.S. government sent men with guns. Much to my disquiet, it seems, here we go again. From the very beginning, U.S. assistance to Haiti has looked to me more like an invasion than a humanitarian relief operation.
On Day Two of the tragedy, a C-130 plane with a military assessment team landed in Haiti, with the rest of the team expected to land soon thereafter. The stated purpose of this team was to determine what military resources were needed.
An Air Force special operations team was also expected to land to provide air traffic control. Now, the reports are that the U.S. is not allowing assistance in, shades of Hurricane Katrina, all over again.
On President Obama’s orders military aircraft “flew over the island, mapping the destruction.” So, the first U.S. contribution to the humanitarian relief needed in Haiti were reconnaissance drones whose staffing are more accustomed to looking for hidden weapon sites and surface-to-air missile batteries than wrecked infrastructure. The scope of the U.S. response soon became clear: aircraft carrer, Marine transport ship, four C-140 airlifts, and evacuations to Guantanamo. By the end of Day Two, according to the Washington Post report, the United States had evacuated to Guantanamo Bay about eight [8] severely injured patients, in addition to U.S. Embassy staffers, who had been “designated as priorities by the U.S. Ambassador and his staff.”
On Day Three we learned that other U.S. ships, including destroyers, were moving toward Haiti. Interestingly, the Washington Post reported that the standing task force that coordinates the U.S. response to mass migration events from Cuba or Haiti was monitoring events, but had not yet ramped up its operations. That tidbit was interesting in and of itself, that those two countries are attended to by a standing task force, but the treatment of their nationals is vastly different, with Cubans being awarded immediate acceptance from the U.S. government, and by contrast, internment for Haitian nationals.
U.S. Coast Guard Rear Admiral James Watson IV reassured Americans, “Our focus right now is to prevent that, and we are going to work with the Defense Department, the State Department, FEMA and all the agencies of the federal government to minimize the risk of Haitians who want to flee their country,” Watson said. “We want to provide them those releif supplies so they can live in Haiti.”
…”There is evidence that the United States found oil in Haiti decades ago and due to the geopolitical circumstances and big business interests of that era made the decision to keep Haitian oil in reserve for when Middle Eastern oil had dried up. This is detailed by Dr. Georges Michel in an article dated March 27, 2004 outlining the history of oil explorations and oil reserves in Haiti and in the research of Dr. Ginette and Daniel Mathurin.
“There is also good evidence that these very same big US oil companies and their inter-related monopolies of engineering and defense contractors made plans, decades ago, to use Haiti’s deep water ports either for oil refineries or to develop oil tank farm sites or depots where crude oil could be stored and later transferred to small tankers to serve U.S. and Caribbean ports. This is detailed in a paper about the Dunn Plantation at Fort Liberte in Haiti….
via friend-of-the-show Colm O’Gorman, of Amnesty International Ireland:
U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret ‘Jesus’ Bible Codes
Pentagon Supplier for Rifle Sights Says It Has ‘Always’ Added New Testament References
ABC: By JOSEPH RHEE, TAHMAN BRADLEY and BRIAN ROSS, Jan. 18, 2010
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the U.S. military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.
Haiti: Small Victory for Shock Resistance
– Naomi Klein, HuffPo
In response to the wave of criticism, the IMF has just issued a statement saying that they will try to turn the $100-million loan to Haiti into a grant.
This is unprecedented in my experience and shows that public pressure in moments of disaster can seriously subvert shock doctrine tactics. They are also now saying that they will not put conditions on the emergency loan–another popular victory, since this is not what they were saying last week.
Of course people have to keep up the pressure to make sure Haiti’s debts really are cancelled as the IMF is now predicting they will be. Something to hold them to! …
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