by Robert C. Koehler

What I thought of, straight off, as I watched that 17-minute WikiLeaks video of Iraqis – including a Reuters photographer and his driver – being strafed on a Baghdad street in 2007 by a U.S. helicopter, was a book of postcards published a decade ago.

The book, compiled by James Allen, is called Without Sanctuary. My guess is that you don’t have it sitting on your coffee table. The postcards and various other stained, frayed photographs – about a hundred of them – depict mostly black men, a few women, a few white men, in the process or aftermath of being lynched in the United States, in the first half of the 20th century. The dangling or burned corpses are surrounded, in most of the pictures, by grim or smirking or benevolently smiling onlookers, some of them children. It’s the most surreal and troubling historical document I’ve ever seen in my life.

It’s a stark testimony to the devaluation of human life, and this is its thread of commonality with the video, which – justify it if you will in the name of war, rail as Defense Secretary Gates did that it’s “out of context” – records helicopter crewmen chuckling in exaltation as they kill a dozen people (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”), including the driver of a van who was trying to rescue one of the wounded.

by Glen Ford

The campaign to bring White nationalism, the founding ideology of the United States, fully out of the closet, kicks into a higher gear on the Right's anti-holiday, April 15. Newt Gingrich and the various tribes of White Rightists unveil their "Contract From America," a scaled-down version of the manifesto the Republicans rallied around to win control of the U.S. House of Representatives, in 1994. The 2010 "contract" is leaner, built for mass Caucasian consumption. It is written largely in code, the language of obfuscation that American racists speak in an attempt to hide their white supremacist beliefs from others - and, in many cases, from themselves. Indeed, much of American mass political speech is conducted in code, allowing white people to identify each other through terms like "middle class," "family values," "taxpayers," "patriots," "law-abiding" - terms which, although literally applicable to people of every ethnicity, are understood to mean "good white American citizens."

Corporate media almost universally describe the Tea Partyers as "anti-government" - which is nonsense. They oppose the government providing assistance - economic, legal, educational, real or imagined - to those that are "undeserving," which in their world consists mostly of folks that can be defined by race, language or religion (using code words, when required by polite society). Naturally, the average Tea Partyer - when sober - will deny having "a racist bone" in his body, but any group whose unifying characteristic is daily engorgement on Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck is, by definition, racist. Anyone who tries to tell you different, is far too tolerant of bigoted behavior, assumptions and speech to be anything but a closet racist, himself.

Deutch made a Constitutional Amendment to fix Citizens United a centerpiece of his campaign

by Joyce Marcel

Margaret Thatcher once said, "There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families."

Maybe her view came from reading too much Ayn Rand at an impressionable age, but Thatcher's idea that the individual is all, unfettered commerce is king and that government -- taxes, regulations and anything except traffic lights and conscription of some other guy to fight for your right to be rich -- is a Big Evil, came to prevail. The common good? She sneered at it.

Thatcher came to mind because I've been reading about these new "benefit companies," or B Corps. Similar to "friends with benefits," these are corporations that allow new companies to write all kinds of social responsibility into their corporate charters.

A law supporting B Corps is currently moving through the Vermont Legislature. A similar law has been introduced in Maryland, and is expected to be discussed soon in New York State, Colorado, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Washington State.

According to the Web site Bcorportation.net, B Corps. use "the power of business to solve social and environmental problems." They are unlike traditional responsible businesses because they "meet comprehensive and transparent social and environmental performance standards; institutionalize stakeholder interests; and build collective voice through the power of a unifying brand."

They also appear to offer protection against hostile and not-too-hostile-but-not-too-benign-either takeovers.

Statement of Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter and Beyond Pesticides Executive Director Jay Feldman

by Andrew Kimbrell

The United States once had one of the safest food systems in the world, but now, 70 million Americans are sickened, 300,000 are hospitalized, and 5,000 die from food-borne illness every year. It is a sad fact: since 9/11, far more Americans have been killed, injured or hurt because of our lack of a coordinated food safety system than by terrorist acts that challenge our Homeland Security system.

The culprits in this assault on American wellbeing aren't shadowy terrorist figures, but rather, they are what most consumers would identify as wholesome -- not harmful -- foods. Peanuts, lettuce, pistachios, spinach, hamburgers sold to Boy Scout camps, peppers, tomatoes, and pepper-coated sausages are among the foods that have sickened and killed Americans in just the last few years. Our children are most at risk from these food threats, with half of all food-borne illness striking children under 15 years old.