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No need for NATO

This Memorial Day, our nation should honor our war dead by either withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or, better yet, completely dismantling the obsolete Cold War defense pact. NATO exists today not to defend against aggressive authoritarian Communism, but to steal resources from weaker non-European countries by military force. Its two most recent military actions made the May 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago a gathering of war criminals.

NATO was established in April 1949 at the height of the Cold War and the creation of the so-called "Iron Curtain" dividing Eastern and Western Europe. In 1955, the Soviet bloc countered with its own military organization, the Warsaw Pact. The current 28 NATO member nations account for an estimated 70% of the world's defense spending.

East and West Germany reunified in October 1990. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991 along with the Warsaw Pact. NATO achieved its goal as a defensive pact of defending Western Europe from the Soviet bloc.

Dave Rovics - new song and blog

"Meanwhile in Afghanistan"
Meanwhile in Afghanistan
The essay:
"My Spring Vacation in Europe"
Spring in Europe

The worst fracking bill in the country?

Last night Ohio’s State Assembly passed Senate Bill 315, what will one of the worst fracking laws in the nation.
The bill heading to Gov. Kasich’s desk fails to reinvest in Ohio communities, fails to adequately protect them from the toxic impacts of the fracking industry, and fails to help Ohio address the growing climate crisis.
It means that Ohio will allow bigger health and safety loopholes and ask the gas industry to pay less than almost any other state in the country, exposing our communities to the worst excesses of the fracking industry. Doctors will be prevented from talking openly about the sickness they see seeping into our water, and the gas industry will keep all of the profits flowing out of our communities.

The rumblings you hear when this bill is signed is not the sound of another injection well caused earthquake (though another is now likely inevitable) – it is the rumblings of a backlash against the politicians who have been bought out with millions of dollars of the gas industry’s money, and have chosen to sacrifice Ohio in return.

The Pits of Hell

This week's NATO summit on the future of the war in Afghanistan probably did not get to the matter of burn pits or abandoned latrines.

These are the details of hell. They are also our legacy, in Afghanistan, in Iraq... wherever we employ our military to pursue our geopolitical self-interest. Strip away the propaganda, strip away the politics and the pursuit of strategic advantage, and what American/NATO policy amounts to is burned, buried, dumped and abandoned waste, some of it radioactive, most of it toxic.

"My nephew went in the military healthy," wrote a woman named Patsy on the website Burn Pits ActionCenter. This is one story out of hundreds that are now surfacing, about American vets poisoned by American war waste that was discharged into the environment of the countries we occupy with no regard for international law or, my God, sanity.

Millions of Illegal Methamphetamines Made From Medicine in Thailand's Hospitals

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Police said they seized one million illicit methamphetamine pills, weeks after discovering nearly 50 million legal tablets to treat common ailments had been stolen from Thailand's hospitals, to make powerful speed drugs to sell to addicts.

An additional two billion similar tablets to treat common colds have been smuggled in from Taiwan and South Korea, also to make illegal drugs, in a complex international racket that appears too entrenched and massive for Thai authorities to stop.

Corrupt chemists and drug dealers have been extracting ephedrine and pseudoephedrine from legal cold remedies and similar medicine in Thailand and secretly shipping it across the border into Laos and Myanmar, a country also known as Burma, where gangs use the ingredients to create a range of amphetamine-based drugs.

Myanmar's drug gangs work among heavily armed minority ethnic insurgents including the Shan, Wa, and other tribes in lawless, mountainous jungles near the border where the two countries meet.

Bank the Knife

Here's a good one by Dave Lippman.
Bank the Knife

Chicago: Peace Town

A huge crowd gathered for several hours and marched for over two miles in the hot sun to oppose NATO and U.S. wars on Sunday in Chicago. Finishing the march outside the NATO meeting, numerous U.S. veterans of current wars denounced their previous "service" and threw their medals over the fence, a scene not witnessed since the U.S. war on Vietnam.

This event, with massive turnout and tremendous energy, saw the participation of numerous groups from Chicago and the surrounding area, including students, teachers, and activists on a variety of issues, as well as anti-war activists and Occupiers from around the country and the world. No one can have been disappointed with the turnout, but it might have been bigger if not for the fear that was spread prior to Sunday. In the face of that fear, Sunday's action was remarkable.

Hey, skinny!

Governor Kasich’s deeply flawed energy plan on fast track for approval - Support No Frack Ohio

Statement of No Frack Ohio
On May 14, Governor Kasich’s energy bill, which will benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of consumers and their vital resources, was approved by the Ohio State Senate. Members of No Frack Ohio, a coalition to stop fracking, denounced the development.

“Instead of protecting Ohioans by banning fracking, the governor and legislature are swiftly moving legislation that would do nothing to protect the public from the water contamination or earthquakes we’ve seen associated with fracking. It’s clear that our state leaders are caving to oil and gas industry lobbyists as Kasich’s bill went from bad to worse when the Ohio Oil and Gas Association intervened” said Alison Auciello, organizer for Food & Water Watch.

FBI seizes server from progressive internet service provider

In an attack on our infrastructure, our movement and the democratic Internet, the FBI seized a server April 19 from one of our cabinets in a colocation facility.

The server is owned by our sister organization, Riseup, and is managed by ECN, a progressive technology provider in Italy.

While the seizure of any equipment is pernicious and damaging, the pointlessness of this seizure suggests an inclination toward extrajudicial punishment and an attempted crackdown on the very possibility of anonymous speech online.

The FBI has told us they are investigating bomb threats targeting the facilities and people at the University of Pittsburgh. They appear to believe that one of the servers used to transmit these threats was an anonymous e-mail server operated by ECN. Anonymous remailers have no logs or traces of who used them, so the FBI will not get any useful information from the stolen machine.

Seizing this machine serves no useful purpose in tracking down or stopping the bomb threats, but it has many serious negative implications. Anonymous e-mail is an important part of the Internet. One

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