Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy

Doug Fine: Can the Cannabis Economy Be Ecologically Sustainable? The future of sustainable cannabis agriculture might reside in the practices of a third-generation Emerald Triangle farmer known to his friends as Fuzzy. He indeed looked a good deal like Thorin Oakenshield. Based in Mendocino County, the 40-something's flowers are perennial top five finishers in California's Emerald Cup ("The World's Only Organic Outdoor Cannabis Competition"). When I asked him his secret on the soggy redwood-enshrouded Humboldt County deck outside this year's competition December 15, his answer was much more Gregor Mendel then Monsanto. "Local breeding and native soil. The guys that bring in bags of fake soil aren't ever going to win." "Organic outdoor cannabis is our brand," says Tim Blake, who founded and produces The Cup, as it's known regionally. Because of this isolation, prohibition, and now, cultural tradition, Northern California's remote Emerald Triangle is poised to provide a model for a sustainable post-prohibition cannabis industry.

The South's Shocking Hidden History: Thousands of Blacks Forced Into Slavery Until WW2 January 15, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. On July 31, 1903, a letter addressed to President Theodore Roosevelt arrived at the White House. The sender was a barely literate African American woman named Carrie Kinsey. Kinsey had already asked for help from the powerful white people in her world. Confronted with a world of indifferent white people, Mrs. “Mr. Considered more than a century later, her letter courses with desperation and submerged outrage. As dumbfounding as the story told by the Carrie Kinsey letter is, far more remarkable is what surrounds that letter at the National Archives. “i have a little girl that has been kidnapped from me … and i cant get her out,” wrote Reverend L. A farmer near Pine Apple, Alabama, named J.

The Nefarious Ways 9-11 Turned America into a Lockdown State February 5, 2013 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here. Consider Inauguration Day, more than two weeks gone and already part of our distant past. One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Here’s how NBC Nightly News described some of the security arrangements as the day approached: “[T]he airspace above Washington... Consider just the money. Maybe it's time to face the facts: this isn’t your grandfather’s America. Making Fantasy Into Reality Bin Laden, of course, is long dead, but his was the 9/11 spark that, in the hands of George W.

Meet the Contractors Turning America's Police Into a Paramilitary Force L3 Communications L3 is everywhere. Those night-vision goggles the JSOC team in Zero Dark Thirty uses? That's L3. Oh, and drones? “L-3 Communications is one of the main subcontractors involved with production of the US’s lethal Predator since the inception of the programme. Unsurprisingly, L3 Communications is well connected beyond the national security community. L3 also supplies local law enforcement with its night-vision products and makes a license-plate recognition (LPR) device, a machine with disturbing implications. L3 Communications embodies the totality of the national security and surveillance state. In many ways, that is the most important story of the post-9/11 United States: the complete evaporation of the separation of foreign and domestic polices.

Boulder Likely to Adopt Its Own Green Utility—and Risks of Going Solo Home Page Title: Boulder Likely to Pursue Its Own Green Utility Boulder could soon be on a long-fought path to break from utility Xcel Energy, control its own electricity and ramp up clean power. But obstacles await. For the past decade, the people of Boulder, Colo., have pursued an elusive goal: getting more clean energy into their grid. But nothing satisfied citizens and politicians, so several years ago they organized themselves into a movement for "municipalization," in which the city would split from Xcel and become its own utility. "Somebody has to stick their neck out and try this," said Boulder Mayor Matt Appelbaum , who believes Boulder will inspire other cities. Under municipalization, cities take over utilities' local electricity operations. While some 2,000 municipal utilities exist across the United States, only half a dozen were formed in recent years. Boulder's circumstances made it fertile soil for the effort. By 2009, the drive to municipalize was back on track.

Bernie Sanders Exposes the Dirty Secret that a Few Wealthy People Control Congress Bernie Sanders has spilled the beans on Congress. Sen. Sanders said, “The Congress of the United States of America is controlled by a handful of extraordinarily wealthy people and corporations.” Transcript: Tavis: To your point about Citizens United, one of the ways that we might push back on this money being the mother’s milk of all of our politics notion, one of the way to push back on that would be some real, some serious, campaign finance reform. It is a not a stretch of the imagination to assume that the few wealthy people who control Congress are many of the same individuals who were on Sanders’ list of the 26 billionaires who tried to buy the 2012 election. The reason why the Republicans who control the House can blatantly ignore the will of majority of Americans is because the American people aren’t their constituency. If you want to get rid of ALEC, the Koch brothers, and the over sized political influence of the wealthy, public financing of our elections is the way to do it.

'I'd rather fight like hell': Naomi Klein's fierce new resolve to fight for climate justice Naomi Klein, black-clad and sharp-tongued mistress of the global anti-corporate left, friend to Occupiers and scourge of oil barons, stood outside a dressing room backstage at Boston's Orpheum Theatre one night last month, a clear-eyed baby boy on her hip. "I'm really trying not to play the Earth Mother card," Klein told me over the phone the week before, as she talked about bringing Toma, her first child, into the world. But she didn't need to worry. >> INTERVIEW: Naomi Klein on motherhood, climate justice, and the failures of the environmental movement << Inside the dressing room, she'd been fielding questions from a small gaggle of young reporters alongside 350.org's Bill McKibben, who had invited her to play a key role in the 21-city "Do the Math" climate-movement roadshow that arrived at the sold-out Orpheum that night. "I mean, that's remarkable, for a piece like that, to not feel the need to correct the record in any way?

Brendan DeMelle: Study Confirms Tea Party Was Created by Big Tobacco and Billionaire Koch Brothers A new academic study confirms that front groups with longstanding ties to the tobacco industry and the billionaire Koch brothers planned the formation of the Tea Party movement more than a decade before it exploded onto the U.S. political scene. Far from a genuine grassroots uprising, this astroturf effort was curated by wealthy industrialists years in advance. Many of the anti-science operatives who defended cigarettes are currently deploying their tobacco-inspired playbook internationally to evade accountability for the fossil fuel industry's role in driving climate disruption. The study, funded by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institute of Health, traces the roots of the Tea Party's anti-tax movement back to the early 1980s when tobacco companies began to invest in third party groups to fight excise taxes on cigarettes, as well as health studies finding a link between cancer and secondhand cigarette smoke. CSE describes the U.S. Sometime around September 2011, the U.S.

The housing “recovery” is a myth This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Every day, it seems a new report comes out praising the ongoing housing recovery. In Georgia, home prices are up 5 percent over last year, a year in which we also had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. Seems a little odd, doesn’t it? Don’t foreclosures usually drive down the market? That’s because the housing “recovery,” as they’re calling it, is fueled almost entirely by Wall Street private equity firms, hedge funds and the Fed’s unwavering support. Many are claiming this is the “private-sector solution” for the recovery we need to get the economy going again. That argument might have made sense for the pilot program Fannie Mae launched last year. The Blackstone group, the biggest player in the new REO to rental market, has spent $2.5 billion in the last year purchasing 16,000 homes, a number that amounts to over $100 million per week. That’s not how Riverstone operates.

"To Get the Gold, They Will Have to Kill Every One of Us First” Tribal Leaders Fight Gold-Hungry Investors Of the thousands of “Avatar” screenings held during the film’s record global release wave, none tethered the animated allegory to reality like a rainy day matinee in Quito, Ecuador. It was late January 2010 when a non-governmental organization bused Indian chiefs from the Ecuadorean Amazon to a multiplex in the capital. The surprise decampment of the tribal congress triggered a smattering of cheers, but mostly drew stares of apprehension from urban Ecuadoreans who attribute a legendary savagery to their indigenous compatriots, whose violent land disputes in the jungle are as alien as events on “Avatar’s” Pandora. The chiefs — who watched the film through plastic 3-D glasses perched beneath feathered headdress — saw something else in the film: a reflection. The only fantastical touches they noticed in the sci-fi struggle were the blue beanstalk bodies and the Hollywood gringo savior. My guide to this simmering “Avatar” in the Amazon was a 57-year-old Shuar chief named Domingo Ankuash.