NDAA: Chris Hedges / “The Final Battle [Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)]”

Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

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[T]he NDAA is not about protecting us. It is about protecting the state from us.

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U.S. EMPIRE IMPLOSION: Chris Hedges / “Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All”

Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the world’s elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many impoverished regions of the world, which have fallen off the economic cliff, are beginning to resemble Gaza, where 1.6 million Palestinians live in the planet’s largest internment camp. These sacrifice zones, filled with seas of pitifully poor people trapped in squalid slums or mud-walled villages, are increasingly hemmed in by electronic fences, monitored by surveillance cameras and drones and surrounded by border guards or military units that shoot to kill. These nightmarish dystopias extend from sub-Saharan Africa to Pakistan to China. They are places where targeted assassinations are carried out, where brutal military assaults are pressed against peoples left defenseless, without an army, navy or air force. All attempts at resistance, however ineffective, are met with the indiscriminate slaughter that characterizes modern industrial warfare.

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INCOME INEQUALITY: Nick Hanauer / “TED Talk On Income Inequality Deemed Too ‘Political’ For Site”

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Hanauer, one of the first nonfamily investors in Amazon.com, shared this argument as part of a talk he gave at the TED University conference. Now, the organizers of TED — a movement aimed at bringing attention to “ideas worth spreading” — is refusing to share Hanauer’s talk on the internet, calling it too “political,” according to the National Journal.

Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, wrote in a post on his website responding to the allegations that the organization is inundated with requests to post talks on its homepage and only features those that are “truly special.” Anderson also claimed that once Hanauer found out the site would’t be posting his talk, he hired a public relations firm to promote the talk to progressive organizations like MoveOn.org. Anderson also released a video of Hanauer’s talk, providing a link to it in his post.

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This post is dedicated to our true unsung heroines and heros, Librarians.