Today marks the 10 year anniversary of when the first detainees made their way into the now infamous Guantanomo Detention Facility. Amnesty International and over 60 other organizations are marking this as the National Day of Action Against Guantanomo and the NDAA.

Take action NOW and tell President Obama that 10 years is too long! Guantanomo needs to be closed. Here is the link to take action:

www.amnestyusa.org/CloseGitmo

Dubbed “Love You Madly: A Concert For John O’Brien”, Morello will be sharing the stage with the likes of members of Maroon 5, Sheryl Crow, The Forest Rangers, Curtis Stiegers, Chantal Kreviazuk, Stephen Stills and a freshly reunited Velvet Revolver, including front man Scott Weiland for a very special one-off gig.

John O’Brien will be remembered most as a award-winning ASCAP composer who worked on Iron Man, Iron Man 2 and Pienapple Express, to name a few. He was tragically found dead in a Chicago hotel room on August 20, 2011 at the age of 45.

Tickets for “Love You Madly: A Concert For John O’Brien” range from $49.50 in advance to $55 on the day of show.

Click Here For More Info On Tickets

By DAN BILEFSKY and SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL — A year ago, the journalist Nedim Sener was investigating a murky terrorist network that prosecutors maintain was plotting to overthrow Turkey’s Muslim-inspired government. Today, Mr. Sener stands accused of being part of that plot, jailed in what human rights groups call a political purge of the governing party’s critics.

Mr. Sener, who has spent nearly 20 years exposing government corruption, is among 13 defendants who appeared in state court this week at the imposing Palace of Justice in Istanbul on a variety of charges related to abetting a terrorist organization.

The other defendants include the editors of a staunchly secular Web site critical of the government and Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has written that an Islamic movement associated with Fethullah Gulen, a reclusive cleric living in Pennsylvania, has infiltrated Turkey’s security forces.

At a time when Washington and Europe are praising Turkey as the model of Muslim democracy for the Arab world, Turkish human rights advocates say the crackdown is part of an ominous trend. Most worrying, they say, are fresh signs that the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is repressing freedom of the press through a mixture of intimidation, arrests and financial machinations, including the sale in 2008 of a leading newspaper and a television station to a company linked to the prime minister’s son-in-law.

The arrests threaten to darken the image of Mr. Erdogan, who is lionized in the Middle East as a powerful regional leader who can stand up to Israel and the West. Widely credited with taming Turkey’s military and forging a religiously conservative government that marries strong economic growth with democracy and religious tolerance, he has proved prickly and thin-skinned on more than one occasion. It is that sensitivity bordering on arrogance, human rights advocates say, that contributes to his animus against the news media.

There are now 97 members of the news media in jail in Turkey, including journalists, publishers and distributors, according to the Turkish Journalists’ Union, a figure that rights groups say exceeds the number detained in China. The government denies the figure and insists that with the exception of four cases, those arrested have all been charged with activities other than reporting.

Turkey’s justice minister, Sadullah Ergin, last month blamed civic groups for creating the false impression that there were too many journalists in jail in Turkey. He said a new plan to enhance freedom of expression this year would alter perceptions.

In court on Wednesday, a defiant Mr. Sener, looking gaunt and pale, blamed the police officials he had investigated for setting him up. “It has been 11 months that I have not been given the chance to utter a single word to defend myself,” he said, speaking to friends during a brief intermission. “I have been a victim in a revenge operation — nothing else.”

The European Human Rights Court received nearly 9,000 complaints against Turkey for breaches of press freedom and freedom of expression in 2011, compared with 6,500 in 2009. In March, Orhan Pamuk, a Turkish writer and Nobel laureate, was fined about $3,670 for his statement in a Swiss newspaper that “we have killed 30,000 Kurds and one million Armenians.”

Human rights advocates say they fear that with the Arab Spring lending new regional influence to Turkey, the United States and Europe are turning a blind eye to encroaching authoritarianism there. “Turkey’s democracy may be a good benchmark when compared with Egypt, Libya or Syria,” said Hakan Altinay, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “But the whole region will suffer if Turkey is allowed to disregard the values of liberal democracy.”

Among the most glaring breaches of press freedom, human rights advocates say, was the arrest of Mr. Sener, 45, a German-born reporter who was working for the newspaper Milliyet at the time of his arrest. In 2010 he won the International Press Institute’s World Press Freedom Hero award for his reporting on the murder of Hrant Dink, a prominent Turkish-Armenian journalist who was assassinated in Istanbul in 2007.

Mr. Sener said he believed that he was in jail because he dared to write a book criticizing the Turkish state’s negligence in failing to prevent Mr. Dink’s murder. His defense team says the prosecution’s case rests on spurious evidence, including a file bearing his name that an independent team of computer engineers concluded had been mysteriously installed by a virus on a computer belonging to OdaTV, an antigovernment Web site. He was held for seven months without charges. If convicted, he faces up to 15 years in jail.

“Nedim Sener is being accused on the basis of rumors and fantasies,” said his lawyer, Yucel Dosemeci. “He is being targeted to create a culture of fear.”

In late December, Turkey drew fresh criticism after the police detained at least 38 people, many of them journalists, saying they had possible links to a Kurdish separatist group. But critics say dozens have been arrested whose only offense was to have expressed general support for the rights of Kurds, a long-oppressed minority here.

Over the past year, the government has been arresting prominent critics like Mr. Sener, as well as dozens of current and former military personnel, intellectuals and politicians who have been linked to what officials say was a plot to overthrow the government by an organization called Ergenekon.

Four years into the investigation, no one among the more than 300 suspects charged in the case has been convicted, even though courts have heard more than 8,000 pages worth of indictments, many of them based on transcripts of surreptitiously recorded private telephone conversations.

Advocates for press freedom say that the government has also moved to mute opposition by using punitive fines and by intimidating the ownership of leading media companies.

In a celebrated case in 2009, the Dogan media group, a large conglomerate, was saddled with a $2.5 billion fine by the Tax Ministry for unpaid taxes. Dogan officials say privately that the real reason was that its publications had given prominent attention to a series of corruption scandals involving senior government officials.

The European Union has expressed concerns about the chilling effect of the fine, which was negotiated down to about $621 million, officials familiar with the case say, as part of a tax amnesty issued last year.

Now, some journalists who work for the Dogan group say there is an unwritten rule not to criticize the governing party. Mr. Erdogan, who has previously called on his supporters to boycott the Dogan group, strongly denied any political motives behind the fine.

After Mr. Erdogan swept to power in 2002, human rights activists initially lauded him for expanding free speech. But after an unsuccessful attempt by the secular opposition to ban Mr. Erdogan’s party in 2008, critics say, Mr. Erdogan embarked on a systematic campaign to silence his opponents.

They say the curbs on press freedom also reflect the fact that Turkey no longer feels obligated to adhere to Western norms at a time when it is playing the role of regional leader and its talks on joining the European Union are in disarray.

Mr. Sener and Mr. Sik were defiant in March as police officers took them into custody at their homes before television cameras. “Whoever touches it gets burned!” Mr. Sik shouted, referring to the Gulen movement, whose members, analysts say, have infiltrated the highest levels of the country’s police and judiciary.

In March, the unpublished manuscript of Mr. Sik’s book on the movement, “The Army of the Imam,” was confiscated by police officers. But the police were unable to stop its publication on the Internet, where at least 20,000 users downloaded it.

While the Internet has become the main weapon against censorship, more than 15,000 Web sites have been blocked by the state, according to engelliweb.com, which tracks restricted pages. For more than two years until last fall, YouTube was banned on the grounds that some videos on the site were insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

The monitoring agency last summer called on Web sites to ban 138 words, including “animal,” “erotic” and “zoo” in English and “fat,” “blonde” and “skirt” in Turkish. It is a tribute to Turkey’s still vibrant media culture that the prohibition inspired an online competition to create the best short story out of the banned words.

By ETHAN BRONNER

JERUSALEM — The Israeli Parliament on Monday held its first public debate on whether to commemorate the Turkish genocide of Armenians nearly a century ago, an emotionally resonant and politically fraught topic for Israel, founded on the ashes of the Holocaust and trying to salvage frayed ties with Turkey.

The session resulted from a rare confluence of political forces — an effort under way for decades by some on the left to get Israel to take a leading role in bringing attention to mass murder, combined with those on the right angry at how Turkey has criticized Israel over its policies toward the Palestinians.

Previous efforts to declare one day a year a memorial for “the massacre of the Armenian people” have failed, and hearings on the topic were restricted to closed sessions of the Parliament’s defense and foreign affairs committee because of concerns over Turkey’s reaction, especially at a time when relations were friendlier.

But with Turkey having recalled its ambassador from Tel Aviv, the hearing was moved this year to the education committee, where sessions are open. The debate was on live television.

“As a people and as a country we stand and face the whole world with the highest moral demand that Holocaust denial is something human history cannot accept,” Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of the Parliament, who has favored official recognition of the genocide, said in his testimony. “Therefore we cannot deny the tragedy of others.”

More than 15 countries have officially labeled as genocide the slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in the chaos connected to World War I and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Its denial is a crime in Switzerland and Slovenia.

Turkey acknowledges atrocities occurred, but not any specific death toll.

At Monday’s hearing, some advocates of commemorating the massacre said their efforts had nothing to do with politics or with the Turkey of today. Rather, they said, the goal was to educate young Israelis about genocide and publicly assert the need to prevent such acts.

But officials from the Foreign Ministry said relations with Turkey were fragile and that passing such a resolution could have bad strategic consequences.

After Israel invaded Gaza three years ago to stop rocket fire by Palestinian militants, Turkey expressed anger. A year and a half ago, the Israeli navy stopped a Turkish-sponsored flotilla from going to Gaza, killing nine activists aboard. Turkey demanded an apology and compensation. When Israel refused, ties were downgraded.

Otniel Schneller, a legislator from the opposition Kadima Party, spoke against the commemoration, saying the region was growing more hostile to Israel in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings and that Israel had to be pragmatic.

“This is the time when we must rehabilitate our relations with Turkey because this is an existential issue for us,” he said. “Sometimes our desire to be right and moral overcomes our desire to exist, which is in the interest of the entire country.”

The committee took no action, agreeing to meet again.

Link To Original Article HERE

“I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.”

The person who created that sign in Zuccotti Park put her or his anonymous finger on the heartbeat of Occupy.

Many wonder what Occupy stands for and why Occupy has not made specific demands – as though it’s not enough that, in Occupy’s brief existence, its participants have emblazoned the difference between the 1% and the 99% upon the consciousness of America. As my longtime colleague Ginger Varney said, “They’ve changed the conversation.”

In his recent speech about the economy, the president referenced the 1% and 99% disparity because he had to; for now, no one can credibly discuss economics without mentioning the 1% and the 99%. Occupy has, indeed, changed the conversation – an achievement that cannot be overestimated.

It’s not my place to speak for Occupy, but I’ll use my own “people’s mic” to offer a proposal: that Occupy demands a constitutional amendment to reverse Supreme Court decisions that have given corporations the rights of citizens. Carefully craft this amendment to make clear, beyond doubt, that a corporation does not enjoy or deserve the constitutional rights of a citizen. Rather, a for-profit corporation is a commercial venture subject to the republic’s laws governing commerce. This amendment must state and enforce that corporations are not people.

Change the Supreme Court’s stance that corporations are people and you change the fundamental rule under cover of which corporations conduct themselves. The passage such an amendment would go a very long way toward getting corporate money out of American politics.

That would be a revolution. It would change the electoral playing field.

In the election year of 2012, anyone running for any office should be made to take a stand on this amendment and answer this question: Do you believe a corporation should have the rights of an individual citizen — yes or no?

The answer to that direct and simple (but not simplistic) question would indicate which side an office-seeker is on, the 1% or the 99%?

Thus the 2012 election would not be about Democrats, Republicans, independents, tea partiers, or Occupy. Instead, the election would be about one central, crucial issue: Do you serve the 1% or the 99%?

You can’t call it a “class war” when the class you defend is 99% of the population.

Make the “corporations are not people” amendment central to the election and you begin the nonviolent, constitutional revolution in commerce that we desperately need.

Now let’s clarify a matter of history.

Economic conservatives – servants of the 1% — claim that all challenges to their conception of capitalism are European in origin, a not-so-subtle way of calling challenges to corporate capitalism un-American.

Those conservatives need a history lesson.

Robert L. Heilbroner, in his classic economics study The Worldly Philosophers (Revised Seventh Edition), reminds us that in Boston in 1639 – just nine years after Puritans founded the city — “one Robert Keayne … [was] charged with a heinous crime: he [had] made over sixpence profit on the shilling, an outrageous gain. The court [debated] whether to excommunicate him for his sin, but … it finally [relented] and [dismissed] him with a fine of two hundred pounds,” an enormous sum in that time and place. Kearyne was so contrite that “before the elders of the Church” he “with tears acknowledged his covetous and corrupt heart.” The first Anglo-Americans considered undue profit “covetous and corrupt.”

That wasn’t the end of it. The minister of Boston used Kearyne’s offense to “thunder forth in his Sunday sermon on some false principles of trade.” In the minister’s words, the most heinous and false principle of trade was this:

“That a man might sell as dear and he can, and buy as cheap as he can.”

Heilbroner: “Even to our Pilgrim forefathers, the idea that [commercial] gain might be a tolerable – even a useful – goal in life would have appeared as nothing short of a doctrine of the devil.”

The ideals of Occupy are as American as the Pilgrims.

Fast forward to Dec. 3, 1861. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican president, included these words in his Annual Message to Congress (excerpted from Abraham Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865):

“[T]here is one point … to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor, in the structure of government [Lincoln’s italics]. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it, induces him to labor. … Now, there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed; nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital, producing mutual benefits. … This is the just, and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way to all – gives hope to all, and consequent energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all. No men living are more worthy to be trusted than those who toil up from poverty – none less inclined to take, or touch, aught which they have not honestly earned. Let them beware of surrendering a political power which they already possess, and which, if surrendered, will surely be used to close the door of advancement against such as they, and to fix new disabilities and burdens upon them, till all of liberty shall be lost.”

Occupy’s ideals are as American as Abraham Lincoln.

When the Supreme Court bases decisions on the precedent that corporations have the rights of people, it does what Lincoln feared:  It fixes new disabilities and burdens upon us, “till all of liberty shall be lost.”

We can change this. It’s been done before.

Until the Civil War, the Supreme Court justified slavery. The 13^th and 14^th amendments (1865 and1868) changed that.

Until 1920, American women were denied the vote. The 19^th amendment changed that.

Until 1964, Southern states enforced segregation by tactics such as poll taxes. The 24^th amendment made those tactics illegal.

Through an amendment to the constitution, we can change the legal status of corporations. We can do it now.

Mayer Vishner, a lifelong activist, has witnessed Occupy Wall Street up close since the first day. He tells me, “Occupy is not an event, it’s not a movement, and it’s not a protest. It’s a consciousness shift.”

America was created by a shift in consciousness, as recalled by John Adams in an 1815 letter to Thomas Jefferson:

“What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the Revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.”

Occupy is as American as Adams and Jefferson. Occupy marks a shift in consciousness that can lead to a new and freer world. Occupy is not about this or that plot of ground. The mission of Occupy is to occupy the future.

Adam Lewis, a strapping Florida man, joined the Marines in 2004 when he was 19, and within a year he was fighting in Iraq’s Anbar Province with Golf Company, 2nd Marine Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment. It was a bloody time in Anbar, with vicious and sometimes hand-to-hand combat with insurgents. Lewis kept busy.

He was first wounded in August 2005 by a bomb blast that perforated an eardrum and left him with ringing in his ears and other injuries. He wasn’t hurt badly enough to be sent home, so he went back on duty and was traveling in a Humvee when the road gave way and he tumbled down an embankment, suffering compression fractures in his back. The Marines put him on light duty until he felt better, and he went back out into the fight.

This time, during operations in Fallujah, Lewis was shot in the head by a sniper. Luckily he had just turned his head and the bullet struck his skull at an angle, but the wound was still severe. After surgery came more than two years of rehab, culminating with his retirement from the Marine Corps on medical grounds in 2007.

To help himself land a god job and a career, Lewis took remedial reading courses to help repair the damage from his head wound, and went on to college. It took him three years to earn his associate degree. He got married and has a two-year-old daughter. This past summer he began seriously looking for work.

So far, no luck.

Having given so much for his country, Adam Lewis, at 26, has been without meaningful employment for four years, and is frustrated and angry after four months of intense job hunting.

“I’ve got a good resume, I’ve followed some good leads — but I’m competing with thousands of others who didn’t go to combat but have lots of experience,” he said. “But I want you to know I have never taken any unemployment money or tried to milk the system.”

To Continue The Article, Click Here

We, the Ninety-Nine Percent, come together with our diverse experiences to transform the unequal, unfair, and growing disparity in the distribution of power and wealth in our city and around the globe. We challenge corporate greed, corruption, and the collusion between corporate power and government. We oppose systemic inequality, militarization, environmental destruction, and the erosion of civil liberties and human rights. We seek economic security, genuine equality, and the protection of the environment for all.

We are inspired and in solidarity with global movements including those across the Middle East, Europe, and the Occupy Wall Street / Occupy Together movement in over 1000 cities in North America. Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.

We humbly acknowledge that Occupy Vancouver is taking place on unceded Coast Salish territories.

We are committed to an inclusive and welcoming space, to addressing issues of oppression and discrimination, and to creating an environment where all the 99% can be heard and can meaningfully participate. We are also committed to safeguarding our collective well-being – including safety from interpersonal violence and any potential police violence.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a working statement that we know will evolve as #OccupyVancouver grows and flourishes. Our demands and our dreams are not limited to this statement as we have many ideas and solutions. As stated by #OccupyTogether, no one group, person, or website could ever speak for this diverse gathering of individuals.