Today is the day when we are all supposed to blog in solidarity with the people of Burma.

From the beginning of the monk's protest and the junta's horrible crackdown, we have seen wonderful diaries, here and over at Docudharma, by numerous people. Today, budydharma's Burma diary finally made it to the Rec. list here. Other people who have diaried today include skrp23, KoNKO, and Nightprowlkitty, among others. Nightprowlkitty's was inspiring to me.

I can't possibly add any new insights to those wonderful diaries, except to pass along the chant "FREE BURMA" and a story from the Times UK that I got today through Truthout on how  groups of people are continuing to defend the monks.

Since all the countries that have the most leverage over Burma have financial interests in providing only mild responses to the horrific crackdown, the hope for democracy probably lies within Burma, in the demands of the people themselves.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE OF BURMA.

Slaughtering you say? Yes, automatic weapons are being used from small aircraft to gun down wolves in Alaska. What kind of people would slaughter these majestic creatures for sport - in a place where there isn't even the excuse of protecting livestock? This sadistic practice doesn't belong anywhere in a society that considers itself "civilized."

Oh yeah, I forgot...we also elected the Chimp...

Below you will find a sickening video made by the Defenders of Wildlife. I found it to be one of the most disturbing things I've seen outside of the clubbing of baby seals in Canada.

Keep that in mind if you decide to watch it.

Well, I have outrage fatigue practically every day, so today I had it again when a friend pointed out a story I had missed the other day: police brutality in the arrest of a minister and peace activist who was trying to get into the Petreus hearing.  

The original video was diaried here and here.

From the sounds of things, it looks like one racist cop was at fault here. The Reverend's comment, that he was "...beaten in the halls of Congress like it was 1967" will stay with me for a long time, and is perhaps befitting of our times under this administration.

I am starting to think that the reason Republicans have been so easily bought off by polluters is because they hate the environment.

If you think this is a radical accusation, think about the rule that's going to be published in the Federal Register tomorrow which enshrines the practice of slicing off the tops of entire mountains.

You can't possibly have any appreciation for the role that the environment plays in sustaining life on earth and let this kind of thing go on. Obviously Bush does not, because he and his cronies have just given this little parting gift to the most rapacious actors in the coal mining industry today.

Dennis Kucinich's campaign website is reporting that ABC News has been doing some "inexplicable" things in editing coverage of his performance during the last Democratic debate, starting with weird things that happened to a poll that showed most people thought he won it.

In all, ABC's actions give the impression that it is out to "delete" Dennis from the Presidential race.

Personally, I'm still undecided, but I do like what Dennis has to say. He has a right to be in all of the debates, and to have what he says in them reported.

Although I am interested in Latin America issues, until the past year I had not paid a particular amount of attention to what has been going on in Venezuela, apart from being entertained by some of Chavez's inflammatory rhetoric. I was aware, however, that in general, media portrayals of Chavez's government and daily life in Venezuela were skewed to the negative.  

Recently, I've been seeing a lot of research and getting first hand accounts from people visiting that country that clearly indicate that most of the U.S. media reporting on Venezuela has been done through the lens of Bush Administration propaganda, at best. At worst it just mindlessly parrots State Department press releases. Judging by a couple of comments I've seen here on Kos, even some people in our independently-minded community are buying into this reporting.

I am not going to go into what I think are the motivations behind the skewed coverage (but think "oil"). Instead, in the interest of getting accurate information out there, this diary is going to be one of a series  on Venezuela's media, economy, and role in the hemisphere. If anyone has any other information to add, please contribute a diary to the series as well!

Lets face it, in addition to the dire political and constitutional straits in which we find ourselves, we are now seeing omens of severe problems in our economy as well. Today there were a few diaries addressing the current situation on Wall Street and in the credit markets. NYCEVE wrote a diary called Paul Krugman is Scared about the situation on Wall Street, and bonddad wrote Credit Markets are Getting Uglier on the situation in the credit markets, among others.

I have long been a fan of the work of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, or CEPR. One of its founders, Dean Baker, has been arguing for years that the housing market was in a bubble, and that when it finally burst it would cause big problems in the economy. Baker always reminds us of the fundamentals, so I wanted to give you a summary of a report that CEPR released today, called
Midsummer Meltdown: Prospects for the Stock and Housing Markets.

Back in June, I did a couple of diaries (hereandhere) on the School of the Americas, now known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). The reason for the diaries was to alert Kos readers to an upcoming vote in Congress that would have killed funding for the school, which is widely known to have produced military officers responsible for torture, disappearances, and other horrors in Latin America.

For anyone following the absurdity of the more anti-immigrant than thou, tougher on terrorism than thou rhetoric of the Republican Presidential candidates, the flub that Fred Thompson made in North Carolina the other day trying to combine the two was soooo satisfying. He's just cooked himself among Cubans in Miami.

Last week, the Democrats in the New York State Assembly ate one of their own over his anti-immigrant rhetoric. They blocked what was normally the automatic renewal of a 1% increase in the sales tax for Suffolk County, over County Executive Steve Levy's anti-immigrant positions. If they don't eventually pass the extension, it will cost the county $300,000 million.

I though I had died and gone to heaven.

UPDATE: A week or two ago I posted a diary about the vote in Congress to cut off funding for a school the military runs in Ft. Benning Georgia that trains members of Latin American militaries. Graduates of this school have had a record of committing terrible, terrible human rights abuses against their own people, including massacres and torture.

This year by the smallest margin ever, a vote to cut off funding for the school was defeated in the House. The margin was only 6 votes.

Some people asked me to post update on who switched their votes at the last minute, which we think was due to Pentagon pressure. If you go to THIS LINK THERE IS A DESCRIPTION OF WHO VOTED TO KEEP THE FUNDING AND WHO SWITCHED THEIR VOTE. I'd say caving to the Pentagon happens often, given recent events, so I want to start outing these cavers!

If you want more information than was in my diary yesterday, or need continuing legislative updates, go to the School of the Americas Watch website here.

There are two amendments to the military appropriations bill currently being debated in the House that would cut off funding for the School of the Americas. Until today, it seemed like they had a good chance to pass by a small margin, but it seems that now the Pentagon has gotten out its bag of dirty tricks to pressure Congress people who have previously voiced support for the bill to change their minds.

Below is a description of the school from the School of the Americas Watch Website

I've been posting diaries lately related to oil and the Democrats' caving on the issue of troop withdrawl. Basically, my point has been is what we all know, that this war was about oil, not terrorism. To me it has been interesting to see the mechanism for controlling the oil fields come to light - we create benchmarks that require Iraq to privatize their oil fields, which would be unprecedented, and may make them ineligible to stay in OPEC (gotta research that one a little more). The Dems went from saying that unless Iraq privatizes we'll withdraw, to agreeing to new language, that says that in order to receive reconstruction funds they have to privatize. This may be even more cruel. But see how the Dems are complicit with the Rethugs in this corporatocracy?

So, it turns out that Iraqi workers are having their say about this. Interestingly, the MSM did not report strike activity this week, but today Truthout did an article on it. Here are some excerpts:

I just came on this Democracy Now interview that Amy Goodman did the other day with John Perkins, of Confessions of an Economic Hitman fame.

If you read his book a couple of years ago, you know that it reveals how the large corporations, through US and European corporatocracies, control the natural resources of third world countries by using economic hitman to go in and overestimate their growth rates so they qualify for loans they can't possibly ever repay. Non cooperative Presidents have been subject to assasination by a group known as Jackals. Plane crashes seem to be a favored method.

Although Perkins has some interesting things to say about the presence of these Jackals in Iraq as we speak, I wanted to publish this diary about the potential danger Ecuador's new president is in, since there was a plane crash last year that killed the defense Minister and seems to have been either a warning or a forewarning to the President of Ecuador.  

Here's a piece of the interview

Last week I wrote a diary citing Anne Wright's Truthout article that gave us a hint as to why the Dems capitulated on the Iraq withdrawl - the OIL! Wright connected the fact that the benchmarks the Bushies and the oil companies created for the Iraqi government included privatizing Iraqi oil supplies to the Dems cave in on withdrawl timetables. The benchmark says that if the oil fields are not privatized there will be no reconstruction funds, instead of US withdrawl. The oil companies have plenty of time to secure those 30 year contracts, don't they?

Well, yesterday on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Antonia Juhasz, a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change Internatioal, and the author of the book, The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. She provided  more specifics about exactly how closely related the Dem cave-in was to empire, private oil fields, and Presidential politics.  

I started out the last diary with the following piece of Wright's article:

For the past couple of days, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has been writing about the racist, gratuitous police abuse of African American and Latino high school students in New York City. The stories of abuse and impunity made my hair stand on end, much as the stories about abuse of Native American women did a few weeks ago.

These are the same neighborhoods with high drop out rates. You have to ask yourself, if you were subject to police harassment and physical abuse just for showing up to school, would you feel like going to school every day? I sure wouldn't!!

Again, a national organization, the ACLU, had to release a large report with recommendations before it got attention.

Here are a few examples that Herbert gives in his column today (I can't directly link it because it's Times Select).

This behavior is called oppression, pure and simple.

Who will hold NYC officials responsible for this child abuse?

Arianna Huffington's conversation with Al Gore, which is in today's Huffington Post, shows why David Brooks and his ilk are afraid of him. Gore has grown a spine and isn't afraid to say out loud that our political system is rotten to the core, and, furthermore, that the Republicans have been able to exploit cracks in our democracy because the general public has been extremely easy to manipulate.

Aside from his obvious success in raising consciousness about global warming, which is now moving people to act, unless Gore runs for office to do something about these systemic problems he'll just join the ranks of punditry who eventually see their books on the remainder list. He's capable of much more than that....

The entire interview with Arianna is on today's Huffington Post.

Last week I wrote a diary citing Anne Wright's Truthout article that gave us a hint as to why the Dems capitulated on the Iraq withdrawl - the OIL! She talked about was the fact the benchmarks that the Bushies created for the Iraqi government included privatizing Iraqi oil supplies, and that's what kept the Dems from going too far to oppose them.

Well, yesterday on Democracy Now, Amy Goodman interviewed Antonia Juhasz, a Tarbell Fellow at Oil Change International, and the author of the book, The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time.

She provides some more specifics about exactly how closely related the Dem cave in was related to creating empire through capturing of oil fields.  

I started out the last diary with the following piece of the article: