by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 18, 2012 | Repression at Home
By Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday handed a victory to corporations and a political advocacy group by allowing them to spend freely before Montana’s 2012 elections, a follow-up case to the court’s major campaign finance ruling two years ago.
The justices granted a request from the three plaintiffs to put on hold a December decision by the Montana Supreme Court that upheld a century-old state law banning independent corporate campaign spending.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs said the Montana decision contradicted the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling two years ago that gave corporations the constitutional free-speech right to spend freely to support or oppose candidates for federal office.
The Montana Supreme Court ruled the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision two years ago did not control the outcome because the Montana law was different and justified by the state’s interest in preventing corporate corruption and influence in politics.
The Supreme Court’s order cleared the way for corporations, unions and other groups to spend unlimited amounts of money on ads and other political activities designed to influence voters.
Montana’s primary elections are on June 5 and general elections are in November.
“While I’m disappointed that for the first time in 100 years Montanans won’t be able to rely on our corporate spending ban to safeguard the integrity of our elections, I am encouraged that the Supreme Court will give this careful consideration,” Montana Attorney General Steve Bullock said in a statement.
“For more than a century, anyone has been able to participate in Montana elections – even out-of-state corporate executives. All we required is that they used their own money, not that of their stockholders, and they disclosed who they are,” Bullock added.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Stephen Breyer, cited the experience in Montana and elsewhere since the ruling two years ago and said it was difficult to maintain that corporate spending does not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.
She said an eventual appeal in the Montana case will give the court an opportunity to consider whether the ruling two years ago should continue to hold sway “in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance.”
The next step in the case will be for plaintiffs to file their appeal with the Supreme Court seeking to overturn the state court ruling.
There has been a massive increase in corporate spending during the political campaigns ahead of the 2012 elections, mainly due to the ruling in 2010.
The Supreme Court case is American Tradition Partnership v. Attorney General of Montana, No. 11-A762.
From The Raw Story: https://web.archive.org/web/20120630092140/http://www.rawstory.com:80/rs/2012/02/18/supreme-court-allows-montana-corporation-election-spending/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 17, 2012 | Obstruction & Occupation
By The Associated Press
A US federal judge in Seattle has declined to immediately restrain the activities of the Sea Shepherd anti-whaling group.
Judge Richard Jones said he would issue a written ruling later, but that he’s inclined to deny a request for a preliminary injunction made by Japanese whalers against the Washington state-based Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
The whalers – the Institute for Cetacean Research – said the Sea Shepherd group has attacked and rammed their ships off Antarctica during the whaling season, and asked the judge to order them to stop. Some of the clashes have been shown on the Whale Wars reality TV show.
Sea Shepherd activists use stink bombs and other nonlethal means to interfere with the whalers. The group argues that its activities are supported by international law, that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction in the Southern Ocean, and that it’s the whalers who have rammed its vessels.
“It is a victory for the Sea Shepherd, for environmentalists. It’s a victory for the whales,” said Charles Moure, an attorney with the Seattle firm of Harris & Moure representing the Sea Shepherd.
Read more from Stuff.co.nz: http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/americas/6438110/Judge-won-t-halt-anti-whaling-groups-activities
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 13, 2012 | Agriculture, Toxification
By Reuters
A French court on Monday declared U.S. biotech giant Monsanto guilty of chemical poisoning of a French farmer, a judgment that could lend weight to other health claims against pesticides.
In the first such case heard in court in France, grain grower Paul Francois, 47, says he suffered neurological problems including memory loss, headaches and stammering after inhaling Monsanto’s Lasso weedkiller in 2004.
He blames the agri-business giant for not providing adequate warnings on the product label.
The ruling was given by a court in Lyon, southeast France, which ordered an expert opinion of Francois’s losses to establish the amount of damages.
“It is a historic decision in so far as it is the first time that a (pesticide) maker is found guilty of such a poisoning,” François Lafforgue, Francois’s lawyer, told Reuters.
Monsanto said it was disappointed by the ruling and would examine whether to appeal the judgment.
“Monsanto always considered that there were not sufficient elements to establish a causal relationship between Paul Francois’s symptoms and a potential poisoning,” the company’s lawyer, Jean-Philippe Delsart, said.
Previous health claims from farmers have foundered because of the difficulty of establishing clear links between illnesses and exposure to pesticides.
Francois and other farmers suffering from illness set up an association last year to make a case that their health problems should be linked to their use of crop protection products.
The agricultural branch of the French social security system says that since 1996, it has gathered farmers’ reports of sickness potentially related to pesticides, with about 200 alerts a year.
But only about 47 cases have been recognised as due to pesticides in the past 10 years. Francois, who suffers from neurological problems, obtained work invalidity status only after a court appeal.
Read more from Reuters: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/13/france-pesticides-monsanto-idUSL5E8DD5UG20120213
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest
By John Tirman / Alternet
The plea bargain in the last Haditha massacre case handed down in January is a fitting end to the Iraq war. In the most notorious case of U.S. culpability in Iraqi civilian deaths, no one will pay a price. And that is emblematic of the entire war and its hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced.
Sergeant Frank Wuterich, the squad leader who encouraged and led his marines to kill 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha in November 2005, was the last of eight originally charged in the massacre. The others were let off on technicalities, or to help the prosecution. One officer, not involved in the killing but the coverup, was acquitted in a military trial.
The responsibility for these killings came down to Wuterich’s role, but he never actually went through a full trial. The military prosecutor opted for the slap-on-the-wrist of demotion to private for the 24 civilian deaths. Wuterich, who admitted to much more in a “60 Minutes” interview in 2007—including rolling grenades into a house filled with civilians without attempting to make an identification—copped only to “dereliction of duty.”
The episode was often compared with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which some 400 civilians were executed by Lieutenant William Calley and some of his army unit in 1967. While the scale and circumstances are quite different, they do bear one striking similarity, and that is the reaction of officials and the American public alike.
The My Lai massacre was uncovered by an enterprising journalist, Seymour Hersh, who had to overcome official disavowals to get the story. When Hersh managed to publish via a small wire service, the story exploded, with many Americans expressing horror and outrage that something like that could be done by American troops.
But as the months passed, another reaction set in. A rally-round-the-troops surge began to take over the news cycle. Conservatives in particular insisted that the soldiers were only following orders. Calley became a kind of folk hero, and eventually he was found guilty but only served three years under house arrest. No one else was convicted for these 400 murders.
The public, which is broadly indifferent to the deaths of civilians in U.S. wars like those in Vietnam and Iraq, simply does not want to come to terms with the horror of these atrocities. “The memories that endure within American public culture,” wrote British scholar Kendrick Oliver in a cultural study of the My Lai massacre, “tend to be more compatible with the interests of power than those of events, like My Lai, which disrupt the identification of the nation with perpetual historical virtue.”
As Oliver points out, a pattern was established during the My Lai episode: public exposure by a journalist, official denials that, when no longer sufficient, give way to an official investigation and perhaps a trial. Vocal segments of the public cry out on behalf of the accused soldiers, pointing to the fog of war, the rules of engagement, and the much greater evils perpetrated by the enemy. In the end, few if any American soldiers are held accountable.
The pattern held not only for My Lai, but for the belated discovery of a large-scale massacre in 1950 at No Gun Ri during the Korean War. Uncovered in 1999 by Charles Hanley and his colleagues at the Associated Press, this massacre—perhaps as many as 300 or 400 South Korean civilians gunned down by a U.S. army unit—also led to an investigation and an acknowledgement that some Korean civilians had been killed, but not an apology. The discoveries also met with a fierce backlash.
The Haditha massacre fits this pattern. There was a coverup by the U.S. Marine Corps, which insisted that 15 Iraqis had been killed by an IED. When reporter Tim McKirk of Time magazine was alerted to the massacre by an Iraqi human-rights group, his reporting sparked a firestorm of attention. Rep. John Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Vietnam veteran who was a reliable supporter of the military, called the massacre “cold blooded murder” and decried the pressure being put on our troops, pressure that could result in tragedies of this kind.
Read more from AlterNet: http://www.alternet.org/world/154087/why_was_no_one_punished_for_america%27s_%22my_lai%22_in_iraq/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Indian Country Today staff
The Navajo call them Doko’oo’sliid, or “Shining On Top.” To the Hopi, the peaks are Nuvatukaovi, or “The Place of Snow on the Very Top.” Whatever name they bear, the San Francisco Peaks are sacred to no less than 13 tribes. So Thursday’s decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow Arizona Snowbowl to make artificial snow out of wastewater is a serious blow to Native American religious beliefs.
Tribes use the peaks for various ceremonies for healing, well-being, balance, commemoration, passages and the world’s water and life cycles.
The Navajo believe the Creator placed them between four mountains: Blanca Peak in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and Hesperus Peak in Colorado. The San Francisco Peaks are the sacred mountains to the west of the Navajo homeland.
The Sacred Land Film Project points out that Navajos collect herbs from the slopes of the peaks and bury the umbilical cords of their children there.
A website dedicated to Navajo religion explains how Navajo beliefs differ from those held by Christians. “In contrast to the Judeo Christian religions which tend to celebrate people and events, and thus can be practiced anywhere, the Navajo religion is founded on relationships to specific places. The Navajo religion is defined by and cannot be separated from its relationship to specific geographical places. These sites are sacred because of special religious events which have occurred in that particular site.”
Ernie Zah, spokesman for Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, said the decision February 9 was “a disappointment. Although the San Francisco Peaks are not within our reservation, they are within our traditional boundaries, within our realm of dwelling, and we make offerings on the Peaks, we have prayers and songs that incorporate not only the San Francisco Peaks but all elements of life, and this court decision to potentially allow the use of reclaimed water to generate snow negates our inherited traditional foundations.”
Lloyd Thompson, a Navajo medicine man, explained to the Navajo Times in 2002 that religious understanding isn’t extended to Native Americans. “If we (Navajo people) took sewer water and put it on Mount Sinai, we’d be put in jail, fined, and maybe even attacked,” he said. Mount Sinai is the site where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God. He also told the Navajo Times that the sewer water that would be used isn’t just contaminated with human waste but also with body parts and blood from hospitals and mortuaries.
Native American sacred sites aren’t like churches, mosques or synagogues where people can worship without interference because those buildings are owned privately. Many sacred sites are on federal land. A 2005 High Country News article discusses this aspect and asks “Can federal lands still be sacred?”
In the article Joe Shirley Jr., then-president of the Navajo Nation, said: “To Native Americans, desecrating the San Francisco Peaks with wastewater is like flushing the Koran down the toilet.”
Read more from Indian Country Today: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/10/sacred-site-faces-legalized-desecration-from-arizona-snowbowl-wastewater-97050
