Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• Indiana’s Camp Atterbury one of 64 U.S. drone bases
• Vote for Hyatt as the country’s worst hotel employer
• Congressional opponents of women’s health attacking again
• Happy 50^th to Walmart
• Global elite evades taxes to the tune of $21 trillion
• Most minimum-wage workers at large, profitable companies
• New Israeli ship operates without people on board
• Petition demanding troop withdrawal from Afghanistan now
• Judge prevents closure of Mississippi’s last abortion clinic
• Activist arrested near White House for protesting hemp ban

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• 2012 likely to be journalists’ deadliest year so far
• Protestors charged with third-degree riot for defending house from foreclosure
• Aid for Haitian earthquake victims goes to build hotels
• Facts about inequality in the U.S.
• Community-labor alliance spurs unionization effort
• War Resister confined to sanctuary of Canadian church
• Military recruiting troops through motorsports marketing
• Texas Wal-Mart becomes nation’s largest single-story library
• Chinese Apple workers undergoing superexploitation
• Torture in CIA 'black site' secret prison in Poland

Peace & Justice News is a collection of news items collected by Bloomington Alternative contributor Linda Greene. Today's edition includes:

• New national diners’ guide helps make wise restaurant choices
• Dell 20^th corporation to stop funding ALEC
• New Venezuelan laws give more power to communities
• TIAA-CREF divests from Caterpillar
• Increasing repression against Iranian labor rights activists
• Israeli 'refuser' on a hunger strike
• Philadelphia adopts resolution to redirect military spending to communities
• FDA helps companies exploit patients with Alzheimer’s
• Nonprofit organizations with ties to industry
• Congress poised to slash food stamps, program that helps minority family farmers

• Living well without God
• Animal rights activist plaintiff in First Amendment case
• Military spending, taxes unending
• Help end 21 years of solitary confinement for prisoner
• Single-payer health care can save $570 billion
• Mali union activist Tiecoura Traore visits the U.S.
• If you have a large student loan debt, it’s your fault
• 43rd Venceremos Brigade to leave for Cuba
• Corporations profiteering on women’s health
• Rio Tinto supports Olympic Summer Games, locks out workers

On a sunny and unseasonably warm Wednesday afternoon, March 21, some 100 people gathered at the Bloomington Courthouse Square to honor Iraq on the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion and occupation and to express their demand for diplomacy, not war, with Iran.

The rally was sponsored by the Bloomington Peace Action Coalition, the Just Peace Task Force of Bloomington's Unitarian Universalist Church and the Bloomington chapter of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.

News Release
Bloomington Peace Action Coalition

BLOOMINGTON, IN – Three Bloomington peace groups are organizing a rally on the Courthouse Square to oppose any attack on Iran. On March 21, the ninth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, activists and citizens will gather on the Square at 5 p.m. to oppose another war, this time on Iran.

Rally organizer David Keppel, who led delegations nine years ago meeting Senator Lugar and his staff to oppose the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and this year to oppose an attack on Iran, says that public turnout is essential.

“Why is the U.S. Congress pushing the Obama administration toward another disastrous war?" he asked. "Congress needs to know that the public wants to rebuild America. We have learned the hard way that wars are easy to start; but they have tragic costs – in lives and money – and they rarely turn out as their planners expected.”

Bashar of Syria is a dictator; his father was a dictator. He is a war criminal, and so was his father. It does not take a lot of wit, nor investigations, to reach these conclusions. Bashar's crimes are well documented and eyewitnesses are abundant. Even a quick look at a random sample of the flood of digitized information coming from there, be it this testimony before the European Parliment, this interview with Anderson Cooper or this New York Times piece on journalist Anthony Shadid leaves no doubts about it.

With the proliferation of social media and digital technologies, it is almost impossible anymore to hide crimes at a scale and as cruel as that of the unfolding Syrian tragedy. Journalists are being killed in Syria; Marie Colvin was. Photographers are being slaughtered; Remi Ochlik was. They were heroes, as this CNN report on their deaths shows. They were heroes because they wanted to, and they did, expose the crimes of the hateful, bloodthirsty tyrant.

During a recent appearance on Pacifica radio’s Democracy Now!, former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold openly criticized President Barack Obama’s decision to accept campaign contributions from Super PACs. Feingold succinctly characterized the president’s reversal on taking Super PAC money: “It’s not just bad policy. It’s also dumb strategy."

Feingold’s point is well taken. Obama’s acceptance of Super PAC contributions flies in the face of his stated opposition to the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision – a ruling that opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate campaign contributions. This reversal may come back to haunt the president, especially as he and the Democrats attempt to capitalize on the popular discontent articulated by the Occupy movement.

Rocky Anderson is always deferential to Occupy Wall Street when asked about the movement, most recently in a Jan. 31 interview with the online environmental magazine Grist. Occupy has been a "very healthy thing in this country," and there’s an "enormous convergence" between its concerns and his. But for inspiration, the Justice Party candidate points to Tahrir Square, not Zucotti Park.

"One of the great inspirations for us was what we saw in much of the Arab world, where people were intent on overthrowing their nations’ dictators," he told Grist's special projects editor Greg Hanscom during a wide-ranging Q&A. "… They put their lives on the line, utilizing democratized means of communication through social networking and engaging in classic grassroots organizing — and they succeeded."

Watching Newsweek's Eleanor Clift confront the question "Are most political reporters simply insiders?" is a discomfiting experience. Her struggle to defend the indefensible unavoidably inspires compassion for her uneasy predicament. But the case she makes so proves the point that any sympathy engendered morphs quickly into cynicism.

The political reporter appeared on a Dec. 29, 2011, panel discussion on Al Jazeera, subtitled the question du jour. Joining her were Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, of whose candidacy Clift knew nothing. Al Jazeera devoted a third of the half-hour program's opinions to the former Salt Lake City mayor. Clift apparently had never heard of him.

"I think Rocky Anderson is running probably to get his issues out there, more than from an expectation that he might necessarily win," she awkwardly speculated aloud, unsure about the Justice Party's name, no less.