The Economic and Political Impact of Immigrants, Latinos and Asians State by State | Immigration Policy Center

The Economic and Political Impact of Immigrants, Latinos and Asians State by State | Immigration Policy Center

Whole Foods Market Caves to Monsanto | Center for Media and Democracy

Whole Foods Market Caves to Monsanto | Center for Media and Democracy

Submitted by Anne Landman on January 28, 2011 - 3:09pm

• agriculture
• food safety
• environment

14KShare

After 12 years of battling to stop Monsanto's genetically-engineered (GE) crops from contaminating the nation's organic farmland, the biggest retailers of "natural" and "organic" foods in the U.S., including Whole Foods Market (WFM), Organic Valley and Stonyfield Farm, have agreed to stop opposing mass commercialization of GE crops, like Monsanto's controversial Roundup Ready alfalfa. In exchange for dropping their opposition, WFM has asking for "compensation" to be paid to organic farmers for "any losses related to the contamination of his crop." Under current laws, Genetically-Modified Organisms (GMOs) are not subject to any pre-market safety testing or labeling. WFM is abandoning its fight with biotech companies in part because two thirds of the products they sell are not certified organic anyway, but are really conventional, chemical-intensive and foods that may contain GMOs and that they market as "natural" despite this. Most consumers don't know the difference between "natural" and "certified organic" products. "Natural" products can come from crops and animals fed nutrients containing GMOs. "Certified Organic" products are GMO-free. WFM and their main distributor, United Natural Foods, maximize profits by selling products labeled "natural" at premium organic prices.

Main Source:

CounterPunch, January 28, 2010

Tucson

Tucson

CHANGE YOUR PROFILE PICTURE Show your support for Tucson by changing your social media profile picture. Save the image above to your computer by right clicking and selecting “save image as,” and then select it as your profile picture online.

SEND A MESSAGE OF SUPPORT Write a personal message of support to Tucson survivors and family members, and we’ll deliver it. Write your message of support first name last name email address zip code

SHARE THEIR STORIES ATTEND A VIGIL NEAR YOU Communities across America are holding vigils on Sunday, January 8th, 2012 to remember those lost one year ago. Visitwww.toomanyvictims.org to learn more.

BREAKING: NYPD Silenting Protesters Live!! from informing the general pu...

Beyond ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: The Music of Occupy Wall Street | Threat Level | Wired.com

Beyond ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: The Music of Occupy Wall Street | Threat Level | Wired.com

Beyond ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’: The Music of Occupy Wall Street

• By Quinn Norton
• 
• December 30, 2011 |
• 2:37 pm |
• Categories: Occupy

A movement goes nowhere without creating culture as it grows.

To wit, the fast growing Occupy movement has become a locus for cultural creation by artists and musicians, as well as technologists and political activists. It started out spare, borrowing from the past.

Back in October, while I was visiting the weary crew of Occupy Long Beach, they gathered in a circle after GA to sing together to one occupier’s guitar. But at that moment there were no songs about the Occupy movement.

Instead they sang ’60s protest standards, Blowin’ in the Wind, What’s going on, and found camaraderie in the Beatles’ With a Little Help from my Friends. But 50-year-old songs could only go so far, they couldn’t really describe the now. In the months since, Occupy music has started to flow.

Here’s a sample of some of the music generated by and about the Occupys.

• The beautiful and folky We Are The Many (above) by Hawaiian artist Makana is not only written specifically as a song for the Occupy movement, it has the distinction have being a surprise act for theWorld Leaders Dinner at APEC, when Makana pulled open his jacket and shirt to reveal an undershirt with “Occupy with Aloha” handwritten on it. He started out quiet and hesitant in front of the room of dignitaries, singing We’ll occupy the streets / we’ll occupy the courts / We’ll occupy the offices of you / ‘Til you do / The bidding of the many, not the few.
• Dear Mr. President, comes straight out of the occupy, from Gabriel Quinn Andreas of Occupy Santa Barbara. He expresses a common sentiment in the occupys, many supporters of Obama that feel he’s failed them with the whole hope-y change-y thing: We gave you a fair chance and this is how it went / Signed sincerely yours / The Other Ninety-Nine Percent.

• Third Eye Blind did an upbeat tribute calling for the youth to rally to the Occupy movement with If Ever There Was A Time, which they’ve made available for free. Despite being overall an optimistic song, (Things only get brighter when you light a spark / Everywhere you go right now is Zuccotti park) it’s bookended by samples from police confrontations, including Iraq vet Scott Olsen’s Occupy Oakland head wound. The group has asked downloaders to donate to the Occupy movement.
• Hip-hop artist MK-ULTRA (Not to be confused with the alternative band from the Bay Area or the Chicago punk band of the same name, both from the 1990s) appears to have joined the movement around September 26th. His track Who’s The Man was shot at Zuccotti park in New York City a month before its eviction.

• The Roaring featuring Ari Herstand did a reggie-influenced song, Finally Here, which emphasizes the arrival and outrage of the young, much as Third Eye Blind did. There’s a pay-what-you-want Bandcamp link, and We Stand As One (#occupywallstreet), a Bob Dylan/Woody Guthrie inspired folk tune for the Occupy movement. Despite the gentle music, this song has the most violent lyrics of these occupy songs, pointed at the metaphorical 1%. And what you won’t share / Will be ripped from your hands / Your body destroyed / The way fire lands / Burning your homes

• Miley Cyrus didn’t pen a song specifically for the Occupy, but her new video for the song Liberty Walk is made out of expertly edited footage from around marches and crackdowns on OWS around the world. It also has the distinction to be the most viewed Occupy-related music video on Youtube, clocking in at 600,000 views.

• While this list is by no means comprehensive, no survey of occupational music overlook OWS’s first music fan, Lupe Fiasco. His new track, The End Of The World, starts talking about Rachel Corrie and Palestine, but spends some time talking about OWS, which he visited early on. He riffs on some common marching chants with lyrics like Whose streets? Our streets, it’ll never be deleted / No matter how many cops that you send to try and beat it

In the New Year, as people process the evictions of the fall and get through the winter, it will likely be culturally rich for Occupiers. It’s one advantage for OWS of the evictions– they’re driving the activist artists, technologists, and makers out of the parks and back into their studios, offices, and hackerspaces.

• PREVIOUSLY
• YOU MIGHT LIKE
• Related Links by Contextly

• Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%
  
• Beyond the Rhetoric: The Complicated, Brief Life of Occupy Boston
  
• Exclusive Video: Tension, Dissension and Construction in Occupied D.C.
  
• Defying Police Blockade, Boston’s Occupy Builds a City
  
• How Occupy Became This Century’s Free Speech Movement
  

Quinn Norton is a writer and photographer who peripatetically covers net culture, copyright, computer security, intellectual property, body modification, medicine, and biotech.
Follow @quinnnorton on Twitter.

Tags: Occupy

• Post Comment |
• Permalink

• inShare53

Agency's Immigration Enforcement Claims Not Supported By Own Data

Agency's Immigration Enforcement Claims Not Supported By Own Data

For Immediate Release: January 4, 2012	Contact: Susan B. Long, TRAC (315) 443-3563 David Burnham, TRAC (202) 518-9000
		TRAC Request of May 17, 2010 (PDF)
		ICE Response of December 20, 2011 (PDF)
		TRAC's January 4, 2012 Appeal (PDF)
		Help Support TRAC's FOIA Efforts
		Other TRAC FOIA Activities

Agency's Immigration Enforcement Claims Not Supported By Own Data

Syracuse, N.Y. — Case-by-case records provided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that many fewer individuals were apprehended, deported or detained by the agency than were claimed in its official statements — congressional testimony, press releases, and the agency's latest 2010 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics.

The ICE data was provided to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in late December, almost two years — 582 days — after TRAC had requested it on May 17, 2010.

Details about the vast differences between the agency activities documented by the data and its public statements are laid out in a FOIA appeal filed by TRAC on January 4. The surprising size of the discrepancies, the TRAC appeal said, indicated that either "ICE has been making highly exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the level of its enforcement activities," or it is "withholding on a massive scale."

TRAC's appeal emphasized that this was not an inconsequential bookkeeping problem, noting "that the alleged failure of the federal government to enforce the immigration laws has been a hotly debated topic during both the Bush and Obama administrations."

"Thus, the agency's apparent inability to substantiate the level of its claimed enforcement activities is a very significant matter," the appeal continued. "Indeed it is central to the current public debate on federal enforcement policy in the ongoing presidential election campaign."

TRAC requested a formal agency investigation of the matter or that it be referred to the Office of Inspector General.

Intervention of FOIA Ombudsman and DHS Director of FOIA Operations

As the unlawful failure of ICE to provide the requested data continued well beyond the legal deadlines, TRAC engaged in numerous unsuccessful attempts to resolve the matter with agency officials and in late November of 2010 asked the Office of Government Information Services (OGIS) for assistance in persuading the agency to act on our request. OGIS, located in the National Archives and Records Administration, was created by Congress in 2007 to serve as a FOIA "ombudsman" resolving conflicts between requesters and agencies. This approach was not very successful, and in mid-October 2011 James V.M.L. Holzer, the Director of Homeland Security's Public Liaison and Director of Disclosure and FOIA Operations, intervened in the case.

In its initial FOIA request in May 2010, TRAC asked for specific information about all individuals who had been arrested, detained, charged, returned or removed from the country for the period beginning October 1, 2004 to date. In its initial and incomplete response, however, ICE so far has only provided TRAC with information through FY 2005. The agency said it would provide detailed information about the more recent years later.

When compared with various public statements by the agency, however, TRAC's analysis of this limited case-by-case information provided found vast discrepancies. Among them: ICE statements claimed almost five times more individual apprehensions than revealed in the data, as well as 24 times more individuals deported and 34 times more detentions.

	Case-by-case Data Release FY 2005	ICE Public Claims FY 2005	Discrepancy Ratio
Number ICE apprehended	21,339	102,034	4.8
Number ICE deported	6,906	166,075	24.0
Number detained by ICE	6,778	233,417	34.4

The failure of ICE to abide by the mandate of the FOIA in a timely way about its immigration enforcement actions during the five-year period covered by our May 2010 request starkly contrasts with the repeated transparency statements of President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and many other administration officials since they came to office almost three years ago.

And it also appears to be a part of a larger pattern. In a three-page letter dated September of 2010, for example, ICE informed TRAC that key statistical data it had previously provided us were now "unavailable" and that the agency without explanation, was unilaterally imposing a $450,000 FOIA processing fee. ICE also claimed that Syracuse University was not an educational institution. Earlier in the same year a sister agency in the Department of Homeland Security — U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) — demanded a $111,930 processing fee. While time consuming, these and other Administration feints, have not stopped TRAC from its two decades long campaign to obtain revealing information from ICE, USCIS, the IRS, the Justice Department and other agencies.

Border Lines: Playing the Numbers Game with Border Drones

Border Lines: Playing the Numbers Game with Border Drones:

Monday, January 2, 2012

Playing the Numbers Game with Border Drones

For decades, the Border Patrol has annually boasted of the millions of pounds of illegal drugs it has seized and the number of immigrants detained.

It’s a practice that border scholar Peter Andreas aptly calls “the numbers game.”

Since the creation of the DHS illegal immigrants and drugs aren’t just illegal, they are now classified as “dangerous people and goods.”

In fiscal year 2011 CBP reports that it seized “nearly five million pounds of narcotics.” But it fails to note that the domestic consumption of illegal drugs, especially marijuana, is steadily increasing despite these monumental numbers or that most of these “narcotics” enter the country from Mexico despite a massive buildup in border security and U.S. support for the Mexican drug war.

In its latest Predator announcement, OAM tried playing the numbers game, but raised questions about the integrity of the numbers in the process. According to OAM:

Since the inception of the UAS program, CBP has flown more than 12,000 UAS hours in support of border security operations and CBP partners in disaster relief and emergency response, including various state governments and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The efforts of this program has led to the total seizure of approximately 46,600 pounds of illicit drugs and the detention of approximately 7,500 individuals suspected in engaging in illegal activity along the Southwest border [author highlighting].

One problem is the low numbers of seizures and apprehensions attributed to drone surveillance.

Another is that all the “narcotics” seizures CBP/OAM attributes to drone surveillance consist of bundles of Mexican-grown marijuana. That’s understandable since marijuana constitutes almost 100% of the drug seizures between the ports of entry along the southwestern border – more than 99% along the Arizona border.

But is this small quantity of marijuana spotted by the Predators worth their $20 million price tag (including surveillance systems and support)? That’s not a question that the congressional oversight committees have asked DHS.

Nor has DHS asked itself questions about comparative costs and benefits of border control measures.

Instead, it has poured steadily increasing budgets for border security into all three of its defined instruments of border control, what it calls the “three pillars of border security,” namely personnel or “boots on the ground,” tactical infrastructure (border fence and other physical barriers,” and technology including the “virtual fence” of ground-based electronic surveillance and aerial surveillance.

In CBP-think, all three pillars are equally important and all components of these border-security pillars are equally fundamental to protecting homeland security.

Unimpressive Numbers

Since 2005 the Border Patrol has seized 13.5 pounds of cannabis. This does not include the border marijuana seizures by CBP agents working at the POEs or by other federal and local law enforcement officials.

Yet OAM, which first deployed in 2005, reports that drone surveillance has led to the seizure of a mere 46,600 pounds of marijuana. Drones, then, played a role in seizing less than one percent of the Border Patrol’s total marijuana in the past six years – to be exact only 0.003%.

On the “dangerous people” front, CBP reports that in the six years of the UAV program, drones have contributed to the apprehension of 7,500 suspected criminals detained. That’s small potatoes when compared to CBP’s overall number of detentions since 2005 – 5.7 million immigrants, including the 327,000 detained in 2011. Expressed as a percentage, amounts to only 0.001%.

Just as DHS eschews cost-benefit analysis, it also doesn’t apply risk analysis. All illegal border crossers and all contraband fall into the broad post-9/11 mission of protecting the homeland against “dangerous people and goods.” If all are dangerous, then DHS argues that all are targets, and the UAV numbers, while small, still demonstrate that these agencies are on target and on mission.

Typically, CBP frames its UAVs as a fundamental instrument in combatting terrorism, even though no terrorists have ever been spotted or captured.

CBP says that the Predators play a “lead role in CBP’s critical anti-terrorism mission.”

Two Predators also patrol the northern border, and Cong. Candice Miller, the Republican from Michigan who chairs the House Subcommittee on Border and Marine Security, complains that CBP is slighting northern border security.

The northern border Predators, however, haven’t led to a single interception of an illegal border crosser in the past two years.