Monday, October 31, 2016

2006 Audio Emerges of Hillary Clinton Proposing Rigging Palestine Election

Unearthed tape: 'We should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win'





On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the Jewish Press.
The tape was never released and has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room. According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the Observer.
The tape is 45 minutes and contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”
Speaking to the Jewish Press about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74 seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” said Sen. Clinton. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”

Saturday, October 29, 2016

Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she doesn’t know how her emails wound up on her husband’s computer


Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has intimated she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband’s computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter.
The person, who would not discuss the case unless granted anonymity, said Abedin was not a regular user of the computer, and even when she agreed to turn over emails to the State Department for federal records purposes, her lawyers did not search it for materials, not believing any of her messages to be there.
That could be a significant oversight if Abedin’s work messages were indeed on the computer of her estranged husband, former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is under investigation for allegedly exchanging lewd messages with a 15-year-old girl. So far, it is unclear what — if any — new, work-related messages were found by authorities. The person said the FBI had not contacted Abedin about its latest discovery, and she was unsure what the bureau had discovered.
According to federal law enforcement officials, investigators found thousands of messages on Weiner’s computer that they believe to be potentially relevant to the separate, Clinton email investigation. How they are relevant — or if they are significant in any respect — remains unknown.

Here’s what happened after the FBI said it would examine newly discovered emails linked to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state.(Video: Bastien Inzaurralde/Photo: Melina Mara/The Washington Post)


Weiner and a lawyer for Abedin did not return messages seeking comment. Clinton has called on the FBI to release more information and predicted nothing would emerge that would change the FBI’s conclusion that no charges were appropriate against her.
FBI Director James B. Comey wrote in a letter to lawmakers Friday that investigators would take “appropriate investigative steps” to determine if any of the messages contained classified information or if they could somehow advance the Clinton probe in another way.
Federal law enforcement officials said it was possible the messages could be duplicates to others already recovered in the case, and they could also be benign. Former FBI officials said that once agents have the legal authority to more closely examine the emails, they would likely use a computer program to weed out duplicates, then slowly examine the remaining messages for classified information and evidence of obstruction or bad intent.
The FBI did not release any new details about what it had found Saturday — even as it faced immense pressure to do so.
Abedin has served in a variety of roles for Clinton, starting as an intern in 1996, when Clinton was first lady. In the State Department, Abedin served as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for operations. Abedin had a State Department email account, a Yahoo account, an account on Clinton’s private server and an account used to support Weiner’s campaign activities.
When Abedin left the State Department, she signed a statement saying she had “surrendered to responsible officials all controlled or administratively controlled documents and materials with which I was charged or which I had in my possession.” The State Department — in the process of collecting Clinton’s and others for records and Freedom of Information Act purposes — later asked Abedin to turn over relevant messages, and she gave her laptop and BlackBerry for review.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said the letter from FBI Director James Comey announcing an inquiry into additional emails was "pretty strange" and "unprecedented" with days to go before Election Day. Clinton told supporters at a rally in Daytona Beach, Fla., that voters "deserve to get full and complete facts." (The Washington Post)

Abedin told the FBI in an interview in April that her attorneys asked for guidance from the State Department on how to conduct that review but did not receive a response. Summarizing Abedin’s interview, FBI agents wrote that she told them the attorneys “erred on the side of caution and opted to include anything that they were unsure about.” In a sworn deposition in June, Abedin said she “looked for all the devices that may have any of my State Department work on it and returned — returned — gave them to my attorneys for them to review for all relevant documents.”

Meanwhile, on Friday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took aim at Abedin in particular as he brought up Clinton’s emails.
“I wonder is she going to keep Huma?” Trump said. “Huma has been a problem. I wonder: Is Huma going to stay there?”

Bernie Sanders Letter To President Obama regarding The North Dakota Access Pipeline!!!








Thursday, October 27, 2016

Off-duty DC police officer says he was brutalized by Prince George's Co. officer



Parker, who is assigned to Harbor Patrol as a diver, says he was thrown to the ground and punched in the head, even as he was identifying himself as an officer, and obeying all commands.


 - An off duty D.C. police officer says he was brutalized by a Prince George’s County police officer who profiled him as a suspect after a shooting at Iverson Mall on Tuesday.
A few minutes after a man was shot and wounded at the mall, Prince George’s County police descended on the Temple Hills neighborhood looking for a suspect who was only described as a black male wearing a hoodie and blue jeans.
Photo of Robert Parker
Around the same time, Robert Parker, an off-duty D.C. police officer who was also dressed in a jacket, a hoodie and blue jeans, was walking away from the mall down Iverson Street. That's when he says a black Prince George’s County officer pulled up alongside him in a marked cruiser.
Parker, who is assigned to Harbor Patrol as a diver, says he was thrown to the ground and punched in the head, even as he was identifying himself as an officer, obeying all commands.
"And I can't remember if I said okay or was just kind of baffled at the moment, and he walked up to me and he started patting me down and I'm just thinking, is this really happening? Because I know the protocol because I'm a police officer," Parker told FOX 5's Paul Wagner. "He reaches around and feels my sidearm, my firearm and I look at him and I see the look in his eye and I say, 'I'm the police.'  I'm literally slammed. I went to the ground I kept saying, 'I'm the police, I'm the police.' There were two other officers there. I felt their presence and they placed me in handcuffs, and then somebody hit me in the right side of my face."
Parker says he wasn't resisting and felt the take down and punch were totally unwarranted. He says he hates to pull the race card, but believes had he been white, the take down and what he views as excessive force would not have happened.
During the incident, Parker says he injured his wrist and went for treatment at the police and fire clinic as well as a hospital emergency room.
Prince George’s County police are defending their officer. They say he's a 20-year veteran with a lot of experience, and is a supervisor in that section of the county. They also issued a lengthy statement which reads:
“Based on our preliminary investigation and preliminary review of an audio recording of the encounter in question, we believe our officer acted professionally and with restraint. This encounter took place within several minutes of the shooting being reported at the mall and approximately three blocks from the scene. Our officer who was responding to the shooting, which had just prompted the lock-down of two nearby schools – spotted a man walking who matched the description. Our officer, a sergeant assigned to our district 4 station, got out of his cruiser and began an investigatory stop. During a pat down, our officer discovered the man had a gun on his waistband. At that point, our officer took the man to the ground during a brief struggle. Our preliminary investigation reveals that it was only after the man was restrained by the original officer and backup officers did he identify himself as a police officer.”

Bernie Sanders Is Crushing It, Raising Millions to Flip the Senate and Promising to Oppose Clinton if Necessary

Get it, Bernie.

First there was this in today's Washington Post:
Sen. Bernie Sanders, a loyal soldier for Hillary Clinton since he conceded the Democratic presidential nomination in July, plans to push liberal legislation with like-minded senators with or without Clinton’s support if she is elected—and to aggressively oppose appointments that do not pass muster with the party’s left wing.
Sanders told the Post, “I will be vigorously in opposition, and I will make that very clear." He said other senators, including Elizabeth Warren, are planning legislation to create a $15 federal minimum wage, free public college, and to aggressively address climate change. The whole article is worth reading.
Sanders said he would not stay silent if Clinton nominates the “same old, same old Wall Street guys” to regulatory positions that are important in enacting and overseeing the financial reforms that he supports.
Good! It's absolutely crucial that Clinton nominate progressives to cabinet positions, as this New Republic piece explains. We won't get progressive policies—broad social welfare policies that might actually improve the lives of, for example, the poor and middle class whites supporting Trump—unless this happens.

Then there's this: Sanders isn't just gearing up for the post-election season. He just took some offhand comments from Republican Paul Ryan—about the possibility of losing the majority in the Senate and Sanders ascending to a committee chairmanship—and raised $2.4 million off of them:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) turned a warning from Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) about a Senate committee into millions for Democratic Senate candidates, the senator’s campaign announced Monday.
Sanders’s campaign Twitter account announced the $2.4 million haul with a link to a page where donors can split sums among a slate of Democrats challenging House and Senate Republicans...
While the orange neofascist could still win, it's highly unlikely, which means progressives should begin turning their attention to pushing their party as far toward democratic socialism as possible. You do that by electing Hillary Clinton, electing as many Democrats as possible, and then pressuring her to eschew the centrist/bankster/neocon stuff and to follow through on the making the historic Democratic Party platform (which includes pot legalization!) a reality.
Keep crushing it, Bernie.


Wednesday, October 26, 2016

THE JOY OF VIOLENT MOVEMENT : INTRODUCING, THE JAZZY NEO-SOUL SOUNDS OF VINEGAR MOTHER



Independent Music with an International Focus
Comprised of Connecticut-born and Brooklyn-based founding trio Julia Zivic (vocals), her brother Jason Zivic (drums) and Itamar Gov-Ari (keys, guitar vocals), along with Mike Roninson (bass) and Chris Stelluti, Brooklyn-based neo-soul/indie soul/progressive soul quintet Vinegar Mother can actually trace its origins to when its founding trio started performing together under the moniker Julia Zivic and The Brothers. And as Julia Zivic and The Brothers, the trio a level of attention as they played the 2014 Greenwich Town Party Festival on a bill that included the likes of George ClintonSantanaBuddy Guy and Dr. Dog — and they finished second in that year’s International TalentHouse Jimi Hendrix Competition for their rendition of “Red House.”
As the trio began to increasingly expand upon their sound, the founding trio decided to start anew and recruited bassist Zack Slaughter and Stelluti to record their debut EP as Vinegar Mother; however, shortly after the band formed, the band went through a lineup change that included Roninson replacing Slaughter, who joined the Marines. As Vinegar Mother, the band has developed a reputation locally as they’ve played a number of shows across this fair city — including The Knitting Factory and The Studio at Webster Hall — and along with a CMJ appearance last year, the band has opened for the likes of The Lonely BiscuitsKat Wright and The Indomitable Soul BandJoanna Teters and Mad Satta, thanks in part to an easygoing and jazzy take on neo-soul that sounds indebted to 90s Erykah BaduJill Scott and others, while possessing an expansive, prog-leaning song structure, as you’ll hear on the band’s latest single “Sunny Seat.”
As Vinegar Mother’s Julia Zivic explained to the folks at Impose, “Sunny Seat,” was inspired by personal experience and a journal entry she had been writing while committing to work.  “I was writing on the subway after a bad falling out with one of my longest best friends,” Zivic explained. And as the story goes, as the G train she was on crossed the Gowanus Canal Bridge, the morning sun had hit her directly in the face. While being comforted but the sun’s warmth, Zivic wouldn’t shake the unbearable feeling of loss — and she begun to write portions of the song while on the train. “I remember writing about how desperate I was to get home to Itamar and Jay and make a song out of these emotions I had. This song and its natural coming about means a whole lot to me. It cuts me deep every time we perform it.” So it shouldn’t be terribly surprising that the song while being somewhat upbeat, possesses both a morning commuter’s weariness and a deep, bitter ache.
For the recently released video, Zivic’s vocals narrate and serve as the innermost thoughts and feelings of the video’s protagonist, also played by Zivic. Throughout the video, its protagonist is reminded of the fact that not only do ghosts linger, they are inescapable and find eerie ways to haunt you. And of course, we see Zivic rush back to her bandmates in Brooklyn to ostensibly write the song with an easygoing, cool-self assuredness.
Be on the look out for the band’s debut EP, The Sunny Seat, which is slated for a November 18, 2016 release, followed by a limited cassette release in March 2017 through Invertebrate Records — and for a growing slate of shows locally. Check out dates below.
Live Shows:
October 27 – Shapeshifter Lounge – Brooklyn, NY
November 8 – Knitting Factory – Brooklyn, NY
November 18 – Radio Bean – Burlington, VT

Missing from Hillary Clinton’s Email: Saudis Worked with CIA to Create Terror

                                     


Hillary Clinton’s email to her current campaign manager John Podesta dated August 17, 2014 implicates Qatar and Saudi Arabia as the main "logistical and financial" supporters of the Islamic State. In the email, Clinton recommended the United States use its “diplomatic and more traditional intelligence assets to bring pressure on the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia" to put them “in a position of balancing policy between their ongoing competition to dominate the Sunni world and the consequences of serious U.S. pressure.”
Secretary of State Clinton’s proposal appears to be a reaction to growing awareness of the role Gulf monarchies have played in supporting and funding not only the Islamic State and al-Nusra but a constellation of jihadi groups in the Middle East. Left unmentioned by Clinton is the fact the United States under a number of administrations has worked closely with the Gulf monarchies to spread Sunni Wahhabism across the Muslim world.
The financial elite in the West played a direct role in the spread of Wahhabism. In 1976 Saudi Prince Mohammed al-Faisal established the Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE). Several of founding members were leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, implicated and in the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993. The Muslim Brotherhood became an MI6 and later a CIA asset during the covert war and assassination plot against the nationalist pan-Arab leader in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
FIBE and the rise of Islamic banking following the dramatic increase in oil prices in 1973 are closely associated with neoliberal financial policies and the philosophy of the of the Chicago School of Economics and the monetary prescriptions of the International Monetary Fund. FIBE worked closely with the infamous Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), a renegade bank used to fund covert terrorist activity and launder money, sell illegal weapons, and facilitate the international drug trade. After BCCI crashed and burned in 1991, investigators discovered it held $589 million in “unrecorded deposits,” $245 million of which were placed with FIBE. “BCCI consisted of a complex alliance of intelligence agencies, multinational corporations, weapons dealers, drug traffickers, terrorists, global bankers and high-ranking government officials,” writes David DeGraw.
The Muslim Brotherhood also established the al-Taqwa Bank in 1988. It funded radical Wahabbi groups, including al-Qaeda. The bank was associated with the late Said Ramadan, one of the Muslim Brotherhood’s top leaders. Ramadan was the son-in-law of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He also helped the Saudi monarchy establish the Muslim World League in 1962. The organization would later fund al-Qaeda and numerous other terror groups. Declassified Swiss documents from the 1960s reveal Ramadan was an asset of the CIA and British intelligence.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that Ramadan is the ideological grandfather of Osama bin Laden. But Ramadan, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their Islamist allies might never have been able to plant the seeds that sprouted into al-Qaeda had they not been treated as US allies during the Cold War and had they not received both overt and covert support from Washington,” writes investigative journalist  Robert Dreyfuss.
In addition to funding radical Islamic groups, the Saudis helped establish the so-called Safari Club in 1976. The chief instigator of the group was Alexandre de Marenches, head of the French external intelligence service SDECE. Like the BCCI, the Safari Club funded off-the-books terror operations and worked closely with al-Mukhabarat al-A’amah, the Saudi intelligence organization. Kamal Adham and then his nephew Prince Turki. Adham acted as a channel between Henry Kissinger and Anwar Sadat, the president of Egypt and former member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Safari Club was run by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi of Iran-Contra fame. He also had connections to the BCCI.
According to author Joe Trento, the Safari Club preferred working with a rogue faction of the CIA made up of agents close to ex-CIA director George Bush Sr. and decorated CIA officer Theodore Shackley. The “private, shadow spy organization within” the CIA, according to Trento, was organized during an effort by the Carter administration to reform the agency following  revelations of the Church Committee in the mid-1970s. (See Peter Dale Scott’s The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America.)
Bush “cemented strong relations with the intelligence services of both Saudi Arabia and the shah of Iran. He worked closely with Kamal Adham, the head of Saudi intelligence, brother-in-law of King Faisal and an early BCCI insider,” Scott writes.
During a May 1979 meeting of the globalist Bilderberg Group the British historian Bernard Lewis presented a British-American strategy which “endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind [Iran’s] Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union.” (See F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New  World Order. London: Pluto Press, 2004: page 172.)
The previous year the CIA began training Islamic militants in Pakistan as part of an effort to destabilize neighboring Afghanistan and draw in the Soviet Union. Robert Gates, who would become CIA director and later secretary of defense under Obama, recalled a meeting held on March 30, 1979 where Under Secretary of Defense Walter Slocumbe proposed “sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.” President Carter formally approved covert aid to the CIA supported Afghan Mujahideen in July. (See Robert Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider's Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007: page 145.)
“The CIA became the grand coordinator: purchasing or arranging the manufacture of Soviet-style weapons from Egypt, China, Poland, Israel and elsewhere, or supplying their own; arranging for military training by Americans, Egyptians, Chinese and Iranians; hitting up Middle-Eastern countries for donations, notably Saudi Arabia which gave many hundreds of millions of dollars in aid each year, totaling probably more than a billion; pressuring and bribing Pakistan-with whom recent American relations had been very poor-to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; putting the Pakistani Director of Military Operations, Brigadier Mian Mohammad Afzal, onto the CIA payroll to ensure Pakistani cooperation,” writes Phil Gasper.
According to Dreyfuss, “America’s alliance with the Afghan Islamists long predated the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and had its roots in CIA activity in Afghanistan in the 1960s and in the early and mid-1970s. The Afghan jihad spawned civil war in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, gave rise to the Taliban, and got Osama bin Laden started on building Al Qaeda.”
The line between radical Islam in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the Islamic State remains unbroken. There is a direct correlation between al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and the Islamic State in Iraq that originated with Tanzim Qaidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn, aka al-Qaeda in Iraq. AQI was the subject of a Pentagon black op and propaganda campaign targeting the Iraqi resistance following Bush’s invasion in 2003.
Hillary Clinton’s email makes it appear the Saudi monarchy is primarily responsible for the ”logistical and financial" support of the Islamic State. In fact, the Islamic State is not the monolithic threat it is portrayed as by the government and its media. It is a loose confederation of jihadi groups sharing a similar ideology based in Saudi Wahhabism. Many of those groups are now receiving direct financial and military support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United States, and others.
As secretary of state Clinton spearheaded an effort to arm and train “moderate” Syrian jihadists and overthrow the government of Bashar al-Assad. After Obama authorized the CIA effort to train and arm the jihadists in 2013, the agency used Saudi money to finance the project.
The New York Times noted in January: “In addition to Saudi Arabia’s vast oil reserves and role as the spiritual anchor of the Sunni Muslim world, the long intelligence relationship helps explain why the United States has been reluctant to openly criticize Saudi Arabia for its human rights abuses, its treatment of women and its support for the extreme strain of Islam, Wahhabism, that has inspired many of the very terrorist groups the United States is fighting.”
More accurately, the United States is reluctant to criticize its Wahhabi partner and seriously endanger the neocon-spawned “Arc of Crisis” carefully designed to divide and balkanize the Arab and Muslin Middle east.
Hillary Clinton clarified the objective in an email dated November 30, 2015. “The best way to help Israel deal with Iran’s growing nuclear capability is to help the people of Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad,” Clinton writes. “Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly.”

Beyond Dakota Access: Energy Transfer Partners Pipelines To Ferry Fracked Gas To Mexico

Even as pipeline protests swelled in North Dakota and other states, the Obama administration quietly approved two international pipelines to be built into Mexico by the same corporation behind the Dakota Access pipeline.

Fracked gas flaring at a fracking well near the Pawnee National Grassland in northeastern Colorado. (Photo: WildEarth Guardians/flickr/cc)
Fracked gas flaring at a fracking well near the Pawnee National Grassland in northeastern Colorado. (Photo: WildEarth Guardians/flickr/cc)


AUSTIN, Texas — Even as Native American activists continue to block construction of the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota and the three other states along its planned 1,100 mile trail, U.S. energy pipeline infrastructure — and opposition to it — is expanding elsewhere.
In May, the Obama administration approved two pipeline projects by Energy Transfer Partners, the driving force behind the Dakota Access pipeline. The Trans-Pecos and Comanche Trail pipelines will carry fracked gas from Texas into Mexico, where it will supply the Mexican energy grid.
A map depicted the routes for both the Trans-Pecos and Comanche Trail pipelines, which will carry fracked gas from Waha, Texas into Mexico.
A map depicting the routes of the Trans-Pecos and Comanche Trail pipelines, which will carry fracked gas from Waha, Texas into Mexico.
“Together, the pipelines will take natural gas obtained from fracking in Texas’ Permian Basin and ship it in different directions across the U.S.-Mexico border, with both starting at the Waha Oil Field,” wrote Steve Horn, a research fellow at DeSmogBlog, on Sept. 20.
Protests have erupted in response to the Trans-Pecos Pipeline in West Texas, particularly in light of Energy Transfer Partners’ use of eminent domain to seize land for pipeline construction from local ranchersand landowners. Activists argue that the legal principle of eminent domain, which is meant to facilitate projects that benefit the public good, should not be used for a construction project that supplies privately-owned energy resources to a foreign nation.
Horn noted that the pipelines are evidence of strengthening ties between the U.S. and Mexican energy markets. He wrote:
“The same month the Obama administration permitted the Comanche Trail and Trans-Pecos Pipelines, the U.S. and Mexican governments announced the signing of an agreement creating the U.S.-Mexico Energy Business Council. This council’s objective is ‘to bring together representatives of the energy industries of the United States and Mexico to discuss issues of mutual interest.’ Its membership list is a who’s who of major oil and gas players.”
Members of the business council include a top Halliburton lobbyist and key advisors to former President George W. Bush.
Pipelines to carrying gas from Texas to Mexico, eventually reaching the city of Guanajuato, are laid underground near General Bravo, in Nuevo Leon state, Mexico.
Pipelines to carrying gas from Texas to Mexico, eventually reaching the city of Guanajuato, are laid underground near General Bravo, in Nuevo Leon state, Mexico.

U.S.-Mexico pipeline construction has also caused conflict within Mexico’s Indigenous communities. On Friday, one person was killed and several others injured in northwest Mexico as members of the Yaqui native community apparently fought over support for a pipeline project, The Associated Press reported. The proposed pipeline, which would bring natural gas from Arizona to the Mexican states of Sonora and Sinaloa, is being built by IEnova, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Sempra Energy.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan and Ecuadorean efforts to control South America’s energy infrastructure have also provoked protest and unrest at times. Writing for CorpWatch in 2008, Jonathan Luna reported that the Wayúu, an Indigenous community of about 500,000 people in northeastern Colombia and northwestern Venezuela, protested a transcontinental pipeline project backed by both nations.
Like so many other Indigenous communities, including the “water protectors” of the Standing Rock Sioux, the Wayúu felt the pipeline threatened their way of life in exchange for few, if any, benefits.
Debora Barros, a Wayúu lawyer, told Luna:
“Our communities feel they have been tricked, made fools of, because these companies came in here buying off and dividing our leaders with minor favors and gifts, and were able to manipulate community support for the project.”

Federal judge rules that Byron Allen’s Entertainment Studios can move forward with $10B lawsuit against Charter Communications

Entertainment Studios Lawsuit

Los Angeles, CA – October 24, 2016 — Entertainment Studios Networks, Inc. announced today that Federal District Court Judge George H. Wu denied Charter Communications’ Motion to Dismiss ESN’s $10 billion lawsuit against Charter for racial discrimination in contracting in violation of Civil Rights Act of 1866, 42 U.S.C. §1981. This is a historic ruling.
“Today was a huge victory for my client,” said attorney Skip Miller, Partner, Miller Barondess, LLP in Los Angeles and Plaintiff’s lead counsel. “The $10 billion racial discrimination lawsuit will move forward against Charter Communications. The judge addressed the complexities of this case and discovery will commence immediately. We have direct and circumstantial evidence that we put forth in our lawsuit. We have evidence of racial bias harbored by top level Charter executives with decision-making authority, and allege, in detail, the discriminatory treatment ESN suffered at the hands of these executives. These well-pleaded allegations, combined with Charter’s internal racial issues, lack of contracting and doing business with 100 percent African American-owned media, were sufficient to defeat Charter’s Motion to Dismiss and we look forward to trial by jury. Separately, we fully expect the dismissal of ESN’s $20 billion lawsuit against Comcast to be overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals where we are under appeal.”
“Everybody talks about diversity, and everybody complains about the lack of diversity and economic inclusion,” said Byron Allen, Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Entertainment Studios. “Today, we made history by doing something about it. This lawsuit was filed to provide distribution and real economic inclusion for 100 percent African American-owned media. The cable industry spends $70 billion a year licensing cable networks and 100 percent African American-owned media receives ZERO. This is completely unacceptable. We will not stop until we achieve real economic inclusion for 100 percent African American-owned media.”
“Charter will now have to open up ALL their contracts which will show the world that they do not do business with 100% African American-owned media out of the billions of dollars they spend on programming every year,” said Mark DeVitre, President, National Association African American-Owned Media (NAAAOM). “Simply put, the contracts and the numbers do not lie, and they will show racial discrimination, lack of economic inclusion for African American-owned media, and blatant racism. In my opinion, Charter’s CEO, Tom Rutledge, has done his stockholders a huge disservice by not sitting down with us, but instead pretending Reverend Al Sharpton speaks for all African Americans which in itself is racist.”
Attached is the court’s opinion. It was issued as a tentative ruling at the beginning of the hearing, and it was made final at the end of the hearing.
About Entertainment StudiosChairman and CEO Byron Allen founded Entertainment Studios in 1993. Headquartered in Los Angeles, it has offices in New York, Chicago, Denver, and Raleigh. Entertainment Studios owns seven 24-hour HD cable television networks serving nearly 80 million subscribers: PETS.TV, COMEDY.TV, RECIPE.TV, CARS.TV, ES.TV, MYDESTINATION.TV, and JUSTICE CENTRAL.TV. The company also produces, distributes, and sells advertising for 40 television programs, making it one of the largest independent producers/distributors of first-run syndicated television programming for broadcast television stations. With a library of over 5,000 hours of owned content across multiple genres, Entertainment Studios provides video content to broadcast television stations, cable television networks, mobile devices, multimedia platforms, and the World Wide Web. Our mission is to provide excellent programming to our viewers, online users, and Fortune 500 advertising partners.
ESN is the parent company of theGrio.com and is a completely 100 percent African-American owned company with seven networks.