AlterNet: By Katherine Paul, Zack Kaldveer: 93% of the Public Wants GMO Labeling.

Monsanto and the Big Agribusiness Giants Plan to Spend Millions in Propaganda to change our minds. Monsanto and Big Food are taking the battle for consumer's hearts and minds to the next level. And it's no coincidence that they're pulling out the big guns just as the Washington State I-522 campaign to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in food products is gaining steam. Can industry front groups and slick public relations firms convince us that the products they're peddling are not only safe, bit good for us? Will the millions they spend on websites and advertorials pay off? We're guessing not, given the latest New York Times poss stating that 93 percent of Americans want labels on foods containing GMOs. Still, it can't hurt to know who's behind the latest salvo of lies and misinformation. In this case, it's a new website and forum, introduced by biotech trade groups no doubt with the help of a new PR firm. And a new front group. The freshly launched GMO Answers
.com is funded by the biotech industry, which claims it just "wants yo talk." And the recently formed Alliance to Feed the Future, representing more than 50 multinational food, agribusiness and biotech companies, wants to give us the "real" scoop on our food system. Monsanto Has All the Answers! Last month the Holmes Report revealed that Monsanto was interviewing public relations firms to spruce up its image. A tall order given Monsanto's status as "most evil corporation in the world." A google search of "Monsanto most hated corporation" returns over 823,000 results. This week, the New York Times reported on the launch of GMOAnswers.com, a new website intended to "answer virtually any questions posed by consumers about genetically engineered crops." Except, of course, where they're hidden in our food. You've got to hand it to the PR firm -new, old, Monsanto's or otherwise, that landed that article. Who gets a mention in the Times these days just for launching a website? Organizations that are funded by Monsanto, Dow, Bayer, Syngenta  and BASF, apparently. The Times quoted, extensively, Cathleen Enright, executive director of the Council for Biotechnology Information and also vice president for food and agriculture at another trade group, the Biotechnology Industry Organization. Enright told the Times that: "We have been accused of purposely hiding information. We haven't done that but now we will open the doors and provide information." Say what? Enright couldn't emphasize enough how this was all a result of the biotech industry being misunderstood by the public, and how Monsanto and the rest of the industry just wants
to be open. Whoever registered the website domain name for GMOAnswers.com doesn't share Enright's new touchy-feely enthusiasm for openness and transparency.    

AlterNet: By Ana Marie Cox: Why Are Liberals Like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren

So quiet about Snowden's Astounding NSA Revelations? Why hasn't the left been able to rally support around opposition to domestic spying? Tea Party candidates on the right have been able to generate excitement among GOP base voters with their calls to end the National Security Agency's domestic spying program. Senator Rand Paul appears to have staked his entire potential presidential campaign on a on a brash defense of personal privacy, except when it comes to abortion. Libertarian leaning Republicans in the House have been unapologetic in their criticism of the program, their own energy magnified by near-unanimous support from conservative talk radio and bloggers. Those advocates of civil liberties, some of them quite new to the cause, have a convenient explanation for why Democrats have been less vocal and slower to criticize the collection of metadata from everyday American citizens: slavish devotion to President Obama, whatever policies he might champion. This is an easy argument to make, and it goes both ways. Polling among Democratic and Republican voters shows a mirror-image of approval for Obama's use of the tactic to Bush's use of it. Since 2002, the number of Democrats who approved monitoring online activities has increased 12 points, among Republicans it has decreased 13 points. Since 2006, the number of Democrats who approved monitoring online activities has increased 12 points, among Republicans who say the government should prioritize privacy over hunting terrorists has risen 22 points. Democrats who say the government should prioritize preventing terrorism over privacy has gone up 18 points. The neatness of these changes in position is almost disturbing. It suggests that advocacy for civil liberties is a zero-sum game: there's a ceiling on Americans' ability to believe that the right to privacy is paramount. Indeed, as you might suspect from the numbers above, polling among all Americans on the balance of national security to privacy has neatly flipped as well. The percentage of voters that worry that the US will go "too far" in violating privacy rights in pursuit of terrorists versus "not going far enough" is now 56% percent versus 36%. In 2001, after the 9/11attacks, it was 31% versus 55%. It's these numbers, rather than the occupant of the White House, that explains Democrats' reluctance to move very aggressively in championing personal privacy, or, at least, it explains the difficulty in creating a lasting coalition around it. If at best, you, and what's more, different phrasing of the question or current events shows inherent wobbliness on the issue, what politician will stick out his or her neck over it? Already, the roster of 2016 presidential candidates illustrates the ambivalence of those who would retain "electable"and "moderate" as part of their bio. While the skirmish between Chris Christie and Paul over terrorism and its prevention via surveillance got a lot of media attention this week, it's more helpful to look at the general trend among potential candidates.

Alternet. Posted by Chauncey DeVega: The New White Poor are Not Honey Boo Boo,

They sleep in their Cars and Shop at Trader Joe's. NBC's recent story on how 80 percent of Americans will be living at or near the poverty level in their lifetimes was accompanied by this photo of a "poor white family". Images that feature human beings "work" in communicating political and social meaning because of how the viewer "reads" them. as such, there are stated and unstated assumptions which the person who is "seeing" applies to the "object" of their gaze. For example, the White Gaze views a photo of a young black man wearing a hoodie and whose pants are sagging and sees a person who exists in a state of criminality, and is a social predator. A photo of a ehite man wearing a suit and walking down Wall Street in New York will be seen by the White Gaze as representing a "respectable" person and a "hard worker" living the "American Dream." In reality, the former may be on the way to his 3rd job, has never been in prison or arrested, and takes care of his aged parents and siblings. The latter could be a child-molesting murderer and rapist, who is also embezzling millions of dollars from his clients. White and male, and Whiteness more generally, views itself as benign and harmless. Black and male, and Blackness more generally, is viewed by White American Society as dangerous and pathological. The power of images is how they harness and channel assumptions about how various types of person-hood find representation in, and are configured by, a broader system of dominance, subordination, privilege, inclusion, exclusion, and hierarchy. NBC.com's photo is an example of those processes at work. There we "see" two overweight white women with a young child, and thus make social and political assumptions about gender and class. We see a small home and generalize from that visual how "poor people" live, and more important, "what type of people" they are. Images also give the viewer permission to empathize or to condemn the subject.Are these "good" people or "bad people?" What is my sense of obligation to them? Does my sense of community extend to people like them? Stereotypes serve as cognitive short cuts which the viewer, and we as a society, use to categorize and evaluate the relative worth of whole groups of people. The way that images of white, poor", female, "overweight", "unattractive", bodies are processed by the viewer is a reflection of how we as a society think about race,, class,and gender. These concepts exist individually while also having a meaning in relation to one another. Moreover, in America, because of the Calvinist-Horatio Alger Myth of Individualism and Upward Mobility, claims on poverty necessarily involve moral judgments. The black single mother is a "welfare queen" who is "lazy" and has "bad morals", The poor white person is a "redneck" or a "hillbilly" with all of the stereotypes and assumptions implicit in such language.  

Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Manning Trial Began on 9/11.

Close your eyes for a moment, think about recent events, and you could easily believe yourself in a Seinfeldian Bizarro World. Now, open them and, for a second, everything looks almost familiar, and then you notice that a dissident is fleeing a harsh and draconian power, known for its global surveillance practices, use of torture, assassination campaigns, and secret prisons, and has found a haven in a heartless world in, hmmm Russia. That dissident, of course, is Edward Snowden, just granted a year's temporary asylum in Russia, a.k.a. the defender of human rights and freedom 2013, just granted a year's temporary asylum in Russia, a.k.a. the defender of human rights and freedom 2013, and so has been released from a Washington-imposed imprisonment in Moscow's international air terminal and the threat of far worse. Now, close your eyes, open them again, and just for a moment, doesn't the world look a little more orderly? After all, a draconian imperial power has taken one of its own dissidents, who wanted to reveal the truth about its cruel war practices and global diplomatic maneuverings, thrown him in prison without charges, abused and mistreated him, brought him before a drumhead military court and, on essentially trumped up charges of "espionage," convicted him of just what its leaders wanted to convict him of. That power, of course,must be Russia and all's right with the world, oops, I mean, that's U.S. Army Private First Class Bradley Manning and the "evil empire" that mistreated him is, gulp, the United States. Think about it for a moment: if Vladimir Putin's Russia is a place of asylum for American dissidents and the U.S. is doing a reasonable job of imitating aspects of the old USSR, we are on Bizarro Earth, aren't we? Today, former State Department whistle-blower Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, considers how America's distant wars have come home and how, under that pressure, this country is morphing into something unrecognizable. Worse yet, it's quite possible that we're only at the beginning of that transformation. To give but a small example of what the future might hold, psychiatrist and author Jonathan Shay, famous for his work with traumatized Vietnam veterans, suggested in Daedalus in 2011 that no one knows what it means for similarly traumatized employees of our Warrior corporations, the rent-a-gun
"veterans" of our recent war zones to come home to no health care and no support system. And he offered an eerie, if provocative, comparison to the footloose German veterans of World War I who, in the 1920s joined the Freikorps and played their part in the radicalization and then Nazification of that country.        

Felicity Arbuthnot: Tony Blair: Libya, Lockerbie, Arms and Betrayals.

This will surely have you falling down with surprise. According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained by the UK Sunday Telegraph, the August 2009 release from Scotlands Barlinnie jail of Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrari, accused of the bombing of Pan AM flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988, hinged on an oil and arms deal, allegedly brokered by roving war monger, sorry, roving Peace Ambassador Tony Blair. At this point it should be said that anyone who has read John \Ashton and Ian Fergusons meticulous Cover up of Convenience on the Lockerbie tragedy could only regard Mr al-Meghrahis conviction as between very unsafe and very questionable. The British Labour Party, which Blair headed for ten years, until 27th June 2007, have always insisted that the release had no connection with commercial deals. After leaving Downing Street, Blair visited Libya some six times. On 8th June 2008, the then British Ambassador to Libya, Sir Vincent Fean, sent Tony Blairs private office a thirteen hundred word briefing on the UKs eagerness to do business with Libya, according to the Telegraph. Blair flew to Tripoli to meet Colonel Quaddafi, just two days later, June 10th. Quaddafi paid: Blair, always lavish with others money had requested, and was granted, the Colonels private jet for the journey. Sir Vincents key objective was for: Libya to invest its L80 billion sovereign wealth through the City of London, according to the Telegraph, which also cites the Ambassador writing of the UK being: privately critical of then President George Bush for shooting the US in the foot by continuing to put a block on Libyan assets in America, in the process scuppering business deals. Britain however, was voraciously scrambling to fill the fiscal gap. Unlike the US and UK who abandon or drone to death their own citizens who are in trouble, or even accused of it, Libya's Administration had stood by their man and seemed to be prepared to do even unpalatable deals to free him and had long been pressuring
the UK to release al-Megrahi. In May 2007, a month before he left Downing Street, Blair had made his second visit to Libya, meeting Colonel Quaddafi and his Prime Minister Al Baghdadi Ali a-Mahmoudi in then beautiful and now near ruined city of Sirte. Surely coincidental, on this trip, a deal was seemingly thrashed out, including prisoner transfer, just before British Petroleum (BP) announced their approximately L454 million investment to prospect for L13 billion worth of oil in Libya. Also, states the Telegraph report: At that meeting, according to Sir Vincents email, Mr Blair and Mr Al Baghdadi agreed that Libya would buy a missile defence system from MBDA, a weapons manufacturer part-owned by Britainss BAE Systems.  

By Ira Chernus: Why Do We Have an Espionage Act?

Military justice is to justice as military music is to music. In a civilian court, anyone accused of a crime has the right to trial by a jury of their peers. In the military, a soldier accused of a very serious crime can be tried without any jury at all. In a civilian court, the judge explains the decision as soon as it's handed down. In the military, the judge just announces the decision and passes sentence. In Bradley Manning's case, Judge Denise Lind did say "she would issue findings later that would findings later that would explain her ruling on each of the charges." We don't know how long "later" may be. All we know now is that Judge Lind does not think Manning was aiding the enemy. Which raises an interesting question: If you haven't done any harm to the United States. So why is it a crime? Why does it count as "spying" at all? I always thought "spying" meant one side stealing secrets from the other side. Manning said he did it on behalf of a nation, his own. He did it on behalf of all of us. I haven't heard of any reason to doubt him. Yet he's getting applause only at the left end of the political spectrum. Across the rest of the spectrum the responses range from uncertainty to outright condemnation. So the public verdict on Manning, like the judge's verdict, is decidedly mixed: "Hero to some, traitor to others, " an AP story called him. You might think he'd get plenty of applause from the mass news media. After all, he provided them with headline material for weeks. But the mass media are hardly showing much appreciation. Some like that AP headline are studiously neutral. Others, including high-profile liberal outlets, avoid the substance of the issue by making Manning's personality the issue. "Bradley Manning had long been plagued by mental health issues," NPR headlined.  The New York Times called him a "loner"and "misfit," "a teenager bullied for his conflicted sexuality." That's one easy way to convict him in the court of public opinion. Which raises another interesting question: Why is there so little public approval for a man who took immense risks simply to let us all know what our government is doing, with our money, in our name? To dig into both of the questions I've raised, let's look at the origins of the Espionage Act under which Manning was convicted. It began with Woodrow Wilson. In his authoritative biography of Wilson, John Milton Cooper reminds us that U.S. entry into World War I aroused a lot of public opposition and protest. "The need to whip up popular fervor behind the war made dissent look dangerous." The Espionage Act aimed mainly to quell that dissent. Perhaps Wilson, who initiated a massive PR campaign to swing public opinion to support the war, recognized that it also works the other way around: Making dissent look dangerous is one powerful way to whip up a popular fervor. Anything that makes the public feel endangered helps generate support for the government's efforts to "defend us against all enemies, foreign and domestic."

AlterNet By Noam Chomsky: Chomsky: America 's Imperial Power Is Showing Real Signs of Decline!

On July 9, the Organization of American states held a special session to discuss the shocking behavior of the European states that had refused to allow the government plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales to enter their airspace. Morales was flying home from a Moscow summit on July 3. In an interview there he had said he was open to offering political asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the former U.S. spy-agency contractor wanted by Washington on espionage charges, who was in the Moscow airport. The OAS expressed its solidarity with Morales, condemned "actions that violate the basic rules and principles of international law such as the inviolability of Heads of State," and "firmly" called on the European governments, France, Italy, Portugal and Spain, to explain their actions and issue apologies. An emergency meeting of UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, denounced "the flagrant violation of international treaties" by European powers. Latin American heads of state weighed in, too. President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil expressed the country's "indignation and condemnation of the situation imposed on President Evo Morales by some European countries" and warned that this "serious lack of respect for the law compromises dialogue between the two continents and possible negotiations between them." Commentators were less reserved. Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron dismissed Europe as "the whore of Babylon," cringing before power. With virtually identical reservations, two states refused to sign the OAS resolution: the United States and Canada. Their growing isolation in the hemisphere as Latin America frees itself from the imperial yoke after 500 years is of historic significance. Morales' plane, reporting technical problems, was permitted to land in Austria. Bolivia charges that the plane, reporting technical problems, was permitted to land in Austria. Bolivia charges that the plane was searched to discover whether Snowden was on board. Austria responds that "there was no formal inspection." Whatever happened followed warnings delivered from Washington. Beyond that the story is murky. Washington has made clear that any country that refuses to extradite Snowden will face harsh punishment. The United States will "chase him to the ends of the earth," Sen. Lindsey Graham warned. But U.S. government spokespersons assured the world that Snowden will be granted the full protection of American law, referring to those same laws that have kept U.S. Army soldier Bradley Manning who released a vast archive of U.S. military and diplomatic documents to WikiLeaks in prison for three years, much of it in solitary confinement under humiliating conditions. Long gone is the archaic notion of a speedy trial before a jury of peers. On July 30 a military judge found Manning guilty of charges that could lead to a maximum sentence of 136 years. Like Snowden, Manning committed the crime of revealing to Americans and others, what their government is doing.