NYC Transit Workers Stage Fare Strike, Open MTA Turnstiles

In response to mounting budget cuts, labor abuses, reduced services, and gross mismanagement, activists from Transport Workers Union Local 100, the Amalgamated Transit Union, and Occupy Wall Street demonstrated this morning by opening more than 20 MTA locations to free transit.

Instead of using our tax money to properly fund transit, Albany and City Hall have intentionally starved transit of public funds for over twenty years; the MTA must resort to bonds (loans from Wall Street) to pay for projects and costs. The MTA is legally required to funnel tax dollars and fares away from transportation costs and towards interest on these bonds, called “debt service.” This means Wall Street bondholders receive a huge share of what we put into the system through the Metrocards we buy and the taxes we pay: more than $2 billion a year goes to debt service, and this number is expected to rise every year. If trends continue, by 2018 more than one out of every five dollars of MTA revenue will head to a banker’s pockets.

The above statement released by Occupy Wall Street.

Senate To Consider Cutting Oil Subsidies

The Senate voted 94 to 4 in favor of holding hearings on a bill cutting tax breaks for oil companies. While such a majority seems a sign of bipartisanship, it’s more likely that the two political parties have decided to use this bill as a political platform in the coming election year.

As Reuters reports, Republicans have seized upon the opportunity to fault Democrats for trying to pass the bill amidst rising gas prices, and Democrats have criticized the GOP in return for sponsoring “corporate welfare”.

Sponsored by Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the legislation would save an estimated $24 billion over 10 years, with the savings going toward extending renewable energy tax credits and reducing the deficit.

Despite all the rhetoric, the price of oil is only going to rise, given that peak world supply was hit in the early 21st century. As conservatives will argue, a short respite may be achieved through increased domestic drilling, but at the sacrifice of natural ecosystems and landscapes. America will just have to get used to paying the real cost of oil.

Read the article here.

Israel Severs Ties to Human Rights Council as Settlements Investigated

As the UN Human Rights council was attempting to investigate the encroaching Israeli settlements on Palestinian land, they were publicly cut off and denied access to both the West Bank territory and Israel itself.

“We are not working with them anymore,” [spokesman Yigal] Palmor said about the Geneva-based forum. “We had been participating in meetings, discussions, arranging visits to Israel. All that is over.”

The international investigation was launched on Thursday, with the United States isolated in voting against the initiative brought by the Palestinian Authority.

Israeli leaders swiftly condemned the UN body, saying it was hypocritical and biased against Israel.

While all this is not surprising, it marks a new chapter in Israel’s progression to total isolation, as the country transitions from a diplomatic peninsula to an island. Read the article in Aljazeera.

Kandahar Civilians Corroborate Assertions of U.S. Death Squad

The Afghan military conducted an investigation into the massacre and, upon discovering the complicity of more than a single soldier, has demanded access to the charged soldier in question, who has been extracted and transported back to the U.S.

GlobalPost is among a number of news organizations who have interviewed the residents of the neighborhoods where the attacks took place:

Massouma, who lives in the neighboring village of Najiban, where 12 people were killed, said she heard helicopters fly overhead as a uniformed soldier entered her home. She said he flashed a “big, white light,” and yelled, “Taliban! Taliban! Taliban!”

Massouma said the soldier shouted “walkie-talkie, walkie-talkie.” The rules of engagement in hostile areas in Afghanistan permit US soldiers to shoot Afghans holding walkie-talkies because they could be Taliban spotters.

“He had a radio antenna on his shoulder. He had a walkie-talkie himself, and he was speaking into it,” she said.

After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, she said he lingered in the doorway of her home.

“While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,” she said.

Read more

The image above belongs to GlobalPost. It becomes difficult to believe U.S. statements that all the killings were committed by a single rogue soldier given the distance between the two villages. Would he not have been stopped, acting alone? Would he have encountered no resistance unless he was backed by others?

Israelis and Iranians Create Viral Love Campaign

Social media for positive change. As organically as the Arab Spring protest movement, an internet-fueled peace campaign has grown massively in its reach:

Ronny Edry and his wife Michal Tamir, together with “Pushpin Mehina”, a small preparatory school for graphic design students, uploaded posters to Facebook depicting images of themselves with their children alongside the words, “Iranians, we will never bomb your country, we [heart] you.”

Attached to each poster was the caption, “To the Iranian people, To all the fathers, mothers, children, brothers and sisters, For there to be a war between us, first we must be afraid of each other, we must hate. I’m not afraid of you, I don’t hate you. I don t even know you. No Iranian ever did me no harm.”

“I’m not an official representative of my country. I m [sic] a father and a teacher”, wrote Edry, adding that he wishes to send a message on behalf of his neighbors, family, students and friends. “[W]e love you. We mean you no harm”, he wrote. “On the contrary, we want to meet, have some coffee and talk about sports.”

And then Iranians responded, returning the message of love and speaking of the eventual death of the regime. Haaretz covers the dialogue.

A clip from Ronny Edry:

Iran To Abandon Pricing Oil In USD In Lieu of EU Sanctions

EU sanctions against the capital Tehran have recently led to a severance from world banking ties. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) has decided recently to cut off Iran from the global financial scheme, leaving its banks isolated.

As ABC News reports:

In addition to sanctioning Iranian officials and freezing the assets of certain companies, the European Union plans to institute an embargo on the import of Iranian oil in July — an attempt to choke off funding for Iran’s nuclear program.

Acting ahead of the proposed oil embargo, Iran has announced it will price its oil outside the dollar come March 20 of this year, and has already begun negotiations with India.

The Telegraph writes:

Iran has the third-largest oil reserves in the world and pricing oil in currencies other than dollars is a provocative move aimed at Washington. If Iran switches to the non-dollar terms for its oil payments, there could be a new oil price that would be denominated in euro, yen or even the yuan or rupee.

India is already in talks with Iran over how it can pay for its oil in rupees.

Even more surprisingly, reports have suggested that India is even considering paying for its oil in gold bullion. However, it is more likely that the country will pay in rupees, a currency that is not freely convertible.

No matter the outcome, western nations will feel the crunch this spring as the third largest oil supplier will be cut off, which is also why talk of war is so prevalent these days.

The excuse for war this time seems to be because of Iran’s nuclear program, although that never posed an issue when India, Israel, and Pakistan were concerned.

Afghan Investigation Claims Kandahar Massacre A Result of US Death Squad

When we first reported on the Kandahar Massacre, it was clear that conflicting accounts were the result of a U.S. coverup. U.S. military officials blocked Afghan military investigators from interrogating the single identified detainee, an army staff sgt. Robert Bales. Meanwhile, neighbors and relatives of the victims reported the murder of 16 civilians was committed not by one man as NATO officials assert, but by a squad of 15-20 soldiers airlifted in by helicopter.

Lt. Gen. Karimi met with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and relatives of the victims on Friday in Kabul.

Saying he had personally visited the villages where the slaughter took place, the General stressed he had repeatedly demanded to meet with the suspect Robert Bales but was turned down cold.

President Karzai has also announced that the conclusions of numerous commissions investigating the crime scenes show the murders was carried out by multiple assailants.

He further stressed the American investigation team refused to sufficiently co-operate with the Afghan side.

The Afghan parliamentary investigation team has reported that anywhere from 15 to 20 US troops could have taken part in the massacre.

The relatives of the victims told President Karzai that the counterinsurgency operation had received air support. They also claim the killers were brought in by military helicopters.

International affairs commentator Rick Rozoff told RT if one takes the methodical nature of the killings into account,“one person could hardly have perpetrated this crime.”

Read the quoted article in RT.

On the Horizon: Flying Web Servers

The Pirate Bay, infamous proliferator of torrented media content, has recently announced they plan to design and test flying server drones in a bid to keep their data transmissions anonymous. This concept has already been seized upon in the protest movement:

Electronic Countermeasures, a project launched by the Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today organization’s Liam Young, is a revolutionary effort that could create wireless networks on the fly. The solution involves a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that carry wireless base stations and broadcast what is essentially a portable, scalable local wireless network. Such a solution would allow protesters and activists to communicate with one another using mobile devices without the need for a cellular Internet connection. In fact, no connection to the Internet would be required at all.

(via BGR)

Read more about this emerging nano-drone phenomena.

France Bans Monsanto GMO Maize, Labels It Human & Environmental Threat

French Agricultural Minister Bruno Le Maire imposed a temporary ban on Monsanto’s genetically modified maize as a “precautionary measure”, until further studies could be completed.

France’s agriculture ministry imposed a ban in February 2008 amid concerns over public safety, but the French State Council said the government had failed to prove that Monsanto crops “present a particularly elevated level of risk to either human health or the environment”.

Monsanto markets MON 810 maize — which has been modified at a genetic level to include DNA from a bacteria — under the trade name YieldGuard as being resistant to insect pests that can threaten harvests.

…

France’s ecology ministry in February said it had asked the European Commission to suspend authorisation for the use of MON 810 crops as studies show that they “pose significant risks for the environment.”

The ministry pointed to a recent study by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) that raised concerns with another form of GM crop, BT11, that it said could also be applied to MON 810.

This Associated Free Press article hosted on Google.

France is part of a large movement away from genetically modified crops, which includes Ireland, Thailand, China, Brazil, Paraguay, Norway, Austria, Spain, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Egypt and most recently Peru. Purezing.com has a larger list, and explains why so many countries are refusing the crops.

Chevron Pauses Brazilian Offshore Oil Extraction After More Seepage Discovered

Oil giant Chevron, after being banned from drilling in Brazilian waters due to a large crude leak in November 2011, has continued to extract oil from existing wells. Now, a new leak has been discovered on the ocean floor, which Chevron officials predictably dismissed as unrelated to their activities in the area, claiming there is “no evidence”.

The [Brazilian regulator] ANP said the oil was seeping out of cracks in the ocean floor, not the Chevron well that was sealed following last year’s leak. Williamson, the Chevron executive, said there was no evidence that the new leak was caused by drilling or production at the Frade field.

The leak was first spotted on March 4, and engineers found the source on March 13, Williamson said. Oil is leaking from an 800-meter-long crack on the sea floor, only a few millimeters wide, said Mauro Pagam, an installation engineer with Chevron.

“We were not drilling or injecting water in the area of the latest leak,” Williamson said. “The information that we have now leads us to believe that this is not ours.” The Campos basin is known for natural leaks of oil – seepage that helped lead to the discovery of the petroleum region, responsible for 80 percent of Brazil’s oil output.

Read the article in Reuters.