My latest piece at AlterNet:

The US is at the forefront of an international arms development effort that includes a remarkable assortment of technologies, which look and sound like they belong in a Hollywood science fiction thriller. From microwave energy blasters and blinding laser beams, to chemical agents and deafening sonic blasters, these weapons are at the cutting edge of crowd control.

The Pentagon’s approved term for these weapons is “non-lethal” or “less-lethal” and they are intended for use against the unarmed. Designed to “control crowds, clear streets, subdue and restrain individuals and secure borders,” they are the 21st century’s version of the police baton, pepper spray and tear gas. As journalist Ando Arike puts it, “The result is what appears to be the first arms race in which the opponent is the general population.”

The demand for non-lethal weapons (NLW) is rooted in the rise of television. In the 1960s and ’70s the medium let everyday Americans witness the violent tactics used to suppress the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Today’s rapid advancements in media and telecommunications technologies allow people to record and publicize images and video of undue force more than ever before. Authorities are well aware of how images of violence play out publicly. In 1997, a joint report from the Pentagon and the Justice Department warned:

“A further consideration that affects how the military and law enforcement apply force is the greater presence of members of the media or other civilians who are observing, if not recording, the situation. Even the lawful application of force can be misrepresented to or misunderstood by the public. More than ever, the police and the military must be highly discreet when applying force.”

The global economic collapse coupled with the unpredictable and increasingly catastrophic consequences of climate change and resource scarcity, along with a new era of austerity defined by rising unemployment and glaring inequality have already led to massive protests in Spain, Greece, Egypt, and even Madison, Wisconsin. From the progressive era to the Great Depression to the civil rights movement, Americans have a rich history of taking to the streets to demand greater equality.

Meanwhile, tens of millions of dollars have been invested in the research and development of more “media-friendly” weapons for everyday policing and crowd control. This has lead to a trade-in of old school weapons for more exotic and controversial technologies. The following are six of the most outrageous “non-lethal” weapons that will define the future of crowd control. Read More

My latest piece at AlterNet:

Over Memorial Day weekend this past May, residents of Miami Beach witnessed a horrific display of police brutality as 12 cops sprayed Raymond Herisse’s car with 100 bullets, killing him. The shooting provoked outrage in the surrounding community, not only because of the murder, but because of what the police did afterward.

Officers on the scene confiscated and smashed witnesses’ cell phones; later, when they were confronted by the media, the police denied trying to destroy videos of the incident.

But 35-year-old Narces Benoit removed his HTC EVO’s memory card and hid it in his mouth. He later sold the video to CNN, placing the police in the awkward position of explaining why they lied about allegations of cell phone destruction. More importantly, the video showed at least two officers pointing guns at Benoit, demanding that he stop filming.

Police brutality takes many forms around the country on a regular basis, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. Sometimes, the only method of accountability is a victim’s word (if they are still alive) against that of an officer. Unsurprisingly, the police officer’s version of the story is often adequate for a judge to dismiss allegations of wrongdoing, unless there is hard evidence of misconduct, such as a video or audio recording, which can be useful to unravel conflicting versions of police-citizen encounters. Read More

My latest article at AlterNet:

There is one group of American workers so disenfranchised that corporations are able to get away with paying them wages that rival those of third-world sweatshops. These laborers have been legally stripped of their political, economic and social rights and ultimately relegated to second-class citizens. They are banned from unionizing, violently silenced from speaking out and forced to work for little to no wages. This marginalization renders them practically invisible, as they are kept hidden from society with no available recourse to improve their circumstances or change their plight.

They are the 2.3 million American prisoners locked behind bars where we cannot see or hear them. And they are modern-day slaves of the 21st century.  Read More

My extra disturbing, latest piece published today at AlterNet:

Just after midnight on May 16, 2010, a SWAT team threw a flash-bang grenade through the window of a 25-year-old man while his 7-year-old daughter slept on the couch as her grandmother watched television. The grenade landed so close to the child that it burned her blanket. The SWAT team leader then burst into the house and fired a single shot which struck the child in the throat, killing her. The police were there to apprehend a man suspected of murdering a teenage boy days earlier. The man they were after lived in the unit above the girl’s family.

The shooting death of Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones sounds like it happened in a war zone. But the tragic SWAT team raid took place in Detroit.

Shockingly, paramilitary raids that mirror the tactics of US soldiers in combat are not uncommon in America. According to an investigation carried out by the Huffington Post’s Radley Balko, “America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement over the last 30 years, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units for routine police work.” In fact, Balko reports that “the most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.”

Some 40,000 of these raids take place every year, and “are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers,” says Balko. And as demonstrated by the case of Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones, these raids have resulted in “dozens of needless deaths and injuries.”

How did we allow our law enforcement apparatus to descend into militaristic chaos? Traditionally, the role of civilian police has been to maintain the peace and safety of the community while upholding the civil liberties of residents in their respective jurisdiction. In stark contrast, the military soldier is an agent of war, trained to kill the enemy. Read More

I did a segment on RT this afternoon about WikiLeaks exposure of Washington’s subservience to US corporate interests, which I wrote about earlier this week on AlterNet.  Here is the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIsZgn7DFeE&w=640&h=385]

Also, today’s episode of Democracy Now featured an excellent interview with Kim Ives and Dan Coughlin, who have been reporting on the 2,000 classified US embassy on Haiti released by WikiLeaks.  So far, they have uncovered details on how Fruit of the Loom, Hanes and Levi’s worked with the United States to block an increase in the minimum wage in the hemisphere’s poorest nation, how business owners and members of the country’s elite used Haiti’s police force as their own private army after the 2004 U.S.-backed coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and how the United States, the European Union and the United Nations supported Haiti’s recent presidential and parliamentary elections, despite concerns over the exclusion of Haiti’s largest opposition party, Lavalas, the party of Aristide.  You can watch that interview here.

My latest piece published yesterday at AlterNet:

One of the most significant scourges paralyzing our democracy is the merger of corporate power with elected and appointed government officials at the highest levels of office.  Influence has a steep price-tag in American politics where politicians are bought and paid for with ever increasing campaign contributions from big business, essentially drowning out any and all voices advocating on behalf of the public interest.

Millions of dollars in campaign funding flooding Washington’s halls of power combined with tens of thousands of high-paid corporate lobbyists and a never-ending revolving door that allows corporate executives to shuffle between the public and private sectors has blurred the line between government agencies and private corporations.

This corporate dominance over government affairs helps to explain why we are plagued by a health-care system that lines the pockets of industry executives to the detriment of the sick; a war industry that causes insurmountable death and destruction to enrich weapons-makers and defense contractors; and a financial sector that violates the working class and poor to dole out billions of dollars in bonuses to Wall Street CEO’s.

The implications of this rapidly growing corporatism reach far beyond our borders and into the realm of American diplomacy, as in one case where efforts by US diplomats forced the minimum wage for beleaguered Haitian workers to remain below sweatshop levels.

In this context of corporate government corruption, one of WikiLeaks’ greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington’s diplomacy. Many of the WikiLeaks US embassy cables reveal the naked intervention by our ambassadorial staff in the business of foreign countries on behalf of US corporations. From mining companies in Peru to pharmaceutical companies in Ecuador, one WikiLeaks embassy cable after the next illuminates a pattern of US diplomats shilling for corporate interests abroad in the most underhanded and sleazy ways imaginable.

While the merger of corporate and government power isn’t exactly breaking news, it is one of the most critical yet under-reported issues of our time. And WikiLeaks has given us an inside look at the inner-workings of this corporate-government collusion, often operating at the highest levels of power. It is crystal clear that it’s standard operating procedure for US government officials to moonlight as corporate stooges. Thanks to WikiLeaks, here are five instances that display the lengths to which Washington is willing to go to protect and promote US corporations around the world. Read More

Here is my latest article published today at AlterNet:

Politicians, the media and the power elite tell us that state and local government budget shortfalls are the result of lavish compensation packages paid to teachers, police officers and firefighters along with “entitlements” such as Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare. The truth is that the economic crisis, sparked by decades of deregulation and greedy financial firms, caused high levels of unemployment that dramatically reduced state and local tax revenues. Add to that years of tax cuts for the wealthy and decades of corporate tax-dodging, and you’ve got yourself a budget crisis.

Conservatives clearly intend to exploit budget crises to starve government. And some Democratic politicians are also cutting services to balance their budgets. In their quest to render government incapable of providing for its citizens, conservatives, with the help of their fellow acquiescing Democrats, are exacting an irreversible and deadly toll that has gone largely ignored by the mainstream press. So it is up to us to bring attention to the disastrous consequences austerity has wrought. Read More

Here is my latest article published today at AlterNet:

Between Collateral Murder, the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, and Cablegate, it appeared as though 2010 would go down in history as the most shocking year in WikiLeaks revelations. Americans discovered that trigger-happy soldiers who have been trained to kill are likely to shoot innocent civilians, including journalists and children. They learned that the US military handed over detainees they knew would be tortured to the Iraqis, and as a matter of policy, failed to investigate the hundreds of reported torture and abuse by Iraqi police and military. The Afghanistan logs showed many more civilians killed than previously known, along with once-secret US assassination missions against insurgents. And Cablegate shed light on a US foreign policy that values self-interest over democracy and human rights at all costs, perpetuating anti-American sentiment in the process.

Is 2011 capable of exceeding 2010’s revelations? And what discoveries in 2011 has WikiLeaks unearthed thus far? Read More

According to an article by Raw Story, the US Department of Education sent a SWAT team (that’s right a SWAT team!) to the home of Kenneth Wright to — collect his wife’s unpaid student loans.

Acting on orders from the U.S. Department of Education, a S.W.A.T. team broke into a California home Tuesday at 6 a.m. and reportedly roughed up a man — all because of his estranged wife’s defaulted student loans. She wasn’t there.

Yet, Kenneth Wright of the city of Stockton was grabbed by the neck by handcuffed before he and his three young children were put in a police car as the officers searched his house, he told ABC News10. He said he was in his underwear the whole time.

“They busted down my door for this. It wasn’t even me,” Wright told the local news station. “All I want is an apology for me and my kids and for them to get me a new door.”

Local police were reportedly not involved in the incident.

This behavior is outrageous! Has the Department of Education been watching too many mafia movies? Because these are the tactics of brutal thugs. However, if this is the new routine for those who fail to pay back their government loans, will SWAT teams be ordered to bust into the homes of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Vikram Pandit of Citigroup or any of the other banks and massive corporations that were bailed out with our taxpayer dollars, even after trashing our economy and paying next to nothing in federal income taxes? Don’t hold your breath.

I had the pleasure of appearing on RTTV this evening to discuss corporate abuse.  I sat down with RT’s Lauren Lyster to talk about the recent PR campaign by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Chevron, and the think tank The Center for Strategic and International Studies.  They have teamed up on a new project to promote “economic development, livelihoods, and reduce poverty worldwide.”

Yeah that’s right, Chevron!  A company that still refuses to pay for deliberately poisoning the Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest which has caused the local indigenous population incalculable suffering from horrific cancers and birth defects, has suddenly grown a heart and wishes to help the less fortunate abroad.

You can watch my segment below.  By the way: the enormous Condi Rice head on the screen behind me seriously creeped me out.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOYW6eoP9SM&w=560&h=349]