Jesuit priest and war resister Daniel Berrigan, soft-spoken but still eloquent at 91, and journalist Chris Hedges joined members of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Faith at Zuccotti Park on Thursday morning. They gathered to sing, pray and denounce the continued determination of Trinity Church, an Episcopal parish, to cooperate with the prosecution of OWS protesters.

The cases stem from trespassing arrests on December 17 of last year at Duarte Square, a plot of land which Trinity Church claims ownership over at Canal Street and Sixth Avenue. Trials begin Monday for the activists, including retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, other clergy members and Jack Boyle, an HIV-positive man who is refusing food or medication unless all charges are unconditionally dropped. Occupy Faith has called for a period of prayer leading up to the trial. Some defendants face 90-day jail sentences. This is a vital test of whether Occupy protesters will experience significant imprisonment for their actions, and of whether the institutions of civil society will rise to protect them.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, has, according to Trinity, offered deals which would not involve fines or jail time to all but three defendants who have “multiple open cases or additional crimes.” So far, none have accepted. In a statement on Thursday, Trinity Rector James Cooper said, “Trinity fully supports the District Attorney’s decision to offer protestors non-criminal dispositions without fines or incarceration, and also respects the protestors’ right to make a choice.”

To understand why this is no ordinary trespassing case, one must first understand why Trinity is no ordinary church. The legal entity which owns Trinity Church, Trinity Wall Street, is one of the largest landowners in Manhattan, controlling millions of square ...

Many, if not all, of the world’s most pressing macroeconomic problems relate to the massive overhang of all forms of debt. In Europe, a toxic combination of public, bank, and external debt in the periphery threatens to unhinge the eurozone. Across the Atlantic, a standoff between the Democrats, the Tea Party, and old-school Republicans has produced extraordinary uncertainty about how the United States will close its 8%-of-GDP government deficit over the long term. Japan, meanwhile is running a 10%-of-GDP budget deficit, even as growing cohorts of new retirees turn from buying Japanese bonds to selling them.

Aside from wringing their hands, what should governments be doing? One extreme is the simplistic Keynesian remedy that assumes that government deficits don’t matter when the economy is in deep recession; indeed, the bigger the better. At the opposite extreme are the debt-ceiling absolutists who want governments to start balancing their budgets tomorrow (if not yesterday). Both are dangerously facile.

The debt-ceiling absolutists grossly underestimate the massive adjustment costs of a self-imposed “sudden stop” in debt finance. Such costs are precisely why impecunious countries such as Greece face massive social and economic displacement when financial markets lose confidence and capital flows suddenly dry up.

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Of course, there is an appealing logic to saying that governments should have to balance their budgets just like the rest of us; unfortunately, it is not so simple. Governments typically have myriad ...

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s protracted effort to fight extradition to Sweden suffered a body blow this week. Britain’s Supreme Court upheld the arrest warrant, issued in December 2010. After the court announced its split 5-2 decision, the justices surprised many legal observers by granting Assange’s lawyers an opportunity to challenge their decision—the first such reconsideration since the high-profile British extradition case from more than a decade ago against former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The decision came almost two years to the day after Pvt. Bradley Manning was arrested in Iraq for allegedly leaking hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents to WikiLeaks. The cases remind us that all too often whistle-blowers suffer, while war criminals walk.

Assange has not been charged with any crime, yet he has been under house arrest in England for close to two years, ever since a “European Arrest Warrant” was issued by Sweden (importantly, by a prosecutor, not by a judge). Hoping to question Assange, the prosecutor issued the warrant for suspicion of rape, unlawful coercion and sexual molestation. Assange offered to meet the Swedish authorities in their embassy in London, or in Scotland Yard, but was refused.

Assange and his supporters allege that the warrant is part of an attempt by the U.S. government to imprison him, or even execute him, and to shut down WikiLeaks. In April 2010, WikiLeaks released a U.S. military video that it named “Collateral Murder,” with graphic video showing an Apache helicopter unit killing of at least 12 ...

Newly published scientific evidence is bolstering calls for greater regulation of some of the world’s most widely used pesticides and genetically modified crops. 

Earlier this year, three independent studies linked agricultural insecticides to colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon that leads honeybees to abandon their hives. 

Beekeepers have reported alarming losses in their hives over the last six years. The USDA reports the loss in the United States was about 30 percent in the winter of 2010-2011. 

Bees are crucial pollinators in the ecosystem. Their loss also impacts the estimated $15 billion worth of fruit and vegetable crops that are pollinated by bees in the United States. 

The studies, conducted in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom, all pointed to neonicotinoids, a class of chemicals used widely in U.S. corn production, as likely contributors to colony collapse disorder. The findings challenged the EPA’s position—based on studies by Bayer CropScience, a major producer of the neonicotinoid clothianidin—that bees are only exposed to small, benign amounts of these insecticides.

The new studies found that bees are exposed to potentially lethal amounts of neonicotinoids in pollen and in dust churned up by farm equipment. They also found that exposure to neonicotinoids can reduce the number of queen bees and disorient worker bees. 

An alliance of beekeepers and environmental groups filed a petition on March 21 asking the EPA to block the use of clothianidin in agricultural fields until the EPA conducts a sound scientific review of the chemicals.

Meanwhile, farm chemicals and the biotech industry have come under fire for the problem of pest resistance. Some weeds and bugs have become less susceptible or immune to the chemicals or biotechnology used to control them. 

In March, national experts on corn pests published a letter to the EPA ...

At this time of year, at graduation ceremonies in America and elsewhere, those about to leave university often hear some final words of advice before receiving their diplomas. To those interested in pursuing careers in finance – or related careers in insurance, accounting, auditing, law, or corporate management – I submit the following address:

Best of luck to you as you leave the academy for your chosen professions in finance. Over the course of your careers, Wall Street and its kindred institutions will need you. Your training in financial theory, economics, mathematics, and statistics will serve you well. But your lessons in history, philosophy, and literature will be just as important, because it is vital not only that you have the right tools, but also that you never lose sight of the purposes and overriding social goals of finance.

Unless you have been studying at the bottom of the ocean, you know that the financial sector has come under severe criticism – much of it justified – for thrusting the world economy into its worst crisis since the Great Depression. And you need only check in with some of your classmates who have populated the Occupy movements around the world to sense the widespread resentment of financiers and the top 1% of income earners to whom they largely cater (and often belong).

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While some of this criticism may be over-stated or misplaced, it nonetheless underscores the need to reform financial institutions and practices. Finance has long been central to thriving ...

A bit less than two years ago, the people of the United Kingdom made an implicit deal with the people of the United States. They installed a government that committed itself to an austerity package as the best way to deal with the ongoing effects of the recession.

Rather than trying to boost demand with increased spending or lower taxes, the Conservative-led coalition government committed itself to an agenda of spending cuts and tax increases. The argument was that the financial markets would be impressed by the UK’s commitment to reducing its budget deficit.

This would lead to lower interest rates, which would help to boost investment, housing and consumption. Lower interest rates should also reduce the value of the pound relative to other currencies. That would make imports more expensive for people in the UK, leading to fewer imports. It would also make exports cheaper for people in other countries, thereby increasing exports. Fewer imports and more exports would provide a further boost to demand.

The commitment to deficit reduction was also supposed to instill confidence in business. They would see that the UK had a responsible government in power that would ensure that the debt would not get out of control. This would encourage them to invest since they could be assured that the UK had a stable future and there was no reason to fear a Greek-style debt crisis.

We have now had almost two years to evaluate the effects of the UK’s austerity policy, which is longer than most governments get to test the results of their policy experiments. After all, President Obama got his head handed to him in the November 2010 elections, which were just 20 months after the passage of his stimulus package.

It sure looks like the austerity critics won this one. While interest rates have remained low in the UK, this has been true of every wealthy country with its own currency, regardless of whether or not it was pursuing an austerity ...

Almost no one had read the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act(CISPA) before it was rushed through the United States House of Representatives in late April and sent to the Senate. CISPA is the successor to SOPA, the “anti-piracy” bill that was recently defeated after an outcry from citizens and Internet companies. SOPA, framed by its proponents in terms of protecting America’s entertainment industry from theft, would have shackled content providers and users, and spawned copycat legislation around the world, from Canada and the United Kingdom to Israel and Australia.

Now, with CISPA, the clampdown on Internet freedom comes in the guise of a bill aimed at cyber terrorism that should give Internet entrepreneurs – and all business leaders – nightmares. And yet, this time, major Internet, and technology companies, including Facebook and Microsoft, supported the bill, on the grounds that it would create a clear procedure for handling government requests for information. Microsoft, at least, belatedly dropped its support after recognizing that the law would allow the US government to force any Internet business to hand over information about its users’ online activities.

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But the bill is far more alarming than that. For example, “the head of a department or agency of the Federal Government receiving cyber threat information…shall provide such cyber threat information to the National Cyber security and Communications Integration Center of the Department of ...

We hear these claims often, even though they're entirely false. An analysis of the facts should make that clear.

(1) The Rich Pay Almost All the Taxes

That's simply not true. The percentage of total taxes paid by the very rich (the top 1%) is approximately the same as the percentage paid by middle class Americans (the 4th quintile, average income $68,700). Here are the details:

Internal Revenue Service figures show that the very rich paid 23% of their incomes in federal income taxes in 2006. The middle class paid about 8% of their incomes in federal income taxes. Based on U.S. Congressional Budget Office figures, the very rich pay just under 2% of their incomes toward social security, while the middle class pays just under 10%. According to a study by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the very rich pay about 7% of their incomes in state and sales and property and excise taxes, while the middle class pays approximately 10%. Another year of Bush tax cuts will reduce the taxes of the very rich by at least 3% more than the middle class.

So total taxes for the very rich are 29% of their incomes (23% + 2% + 7% - 3%). Total taxes for the middle class are 28% of their incomes (8% + 10% + 10%). These figures agree with CTJ's 2011 estimate of total taxes paid.

(2) Tax Rates Are Too High

In 2009, the United States ranked 26th out of 28 OECD countries in total federal, state, and local taxes as a percent of GDP. Only Chile and Mexico had lower tax rates.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, "federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows." For taxpayers in the top 1%, the tax burden has fallen dramatically in recent years.

At very high income levels, beginning at about the million dollar range, federal income tax actually becomes regressive. Effective tax rates level off at about 25%, and then go down from there. This is because all incomes over ...

A study by the Spain-based group Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN), released late February, estimates that some 35 million hectares of land have been sold or leased in 416 recent, large-scale land grabbing deals in 66 countries, mostly in Africa.

Another analysis of land grabs, carried out by the International Land Coalition (ILC), released last January, found that between 2000 and 2010 some 203 million hectares were leased or sold in developing countries, mainly in Africa, but also in Latin America, Asia, and even Eastern Europe, to foreign investors.

"This land area is equivalent to over eight times the size of the United Kingdom," the ILC said in its report 'Land Rights and the Rush for Land - Findings of the Global Commercial Pressures on Land Research Project.'

Most land is used to produce inputs for so called biofuels, ILC pointed out.

In his new book on the subject, award-winning Italian journalist Stefano Liberti says that this massive global land grab is the direct consequence of the privatisation and liberalisation policies imposed for years upon developing countries by international financial institutions such as the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and investment in agricultural policies promoted by United Nations agencies such as the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO).

The book, published originally in Italian under the title 'Land ...

Nearly four years after the start of the global financial crisis, many are wondering why economic recovery is taking so long. Indeed, its sluggishness has confounded even the experts. According to the International Monetary Fund, the world economy should have grown by 4.4% in 2011, and should grow by 4.5% in 2012. In fact, the latest figures from the World Bank indicate that growth reached just 2.7% in 2011, and will slow this year to 2.5% – a figure that may well need to be revised downwards.

There are two possible reasons for the discrepancy between forecast and outcome. Either the damage caused by the financial crisis was more serious than people realized, or the economic medicine prescribed was less efficacious than policymakers believed.

In fact, the gravity of the banking crisis was quickly grasped. Huge stimulus packages were implemented in 2008-9, led by the United States and China, coordinated by Britain, and with the reluctant support of Germany. Interest rates were slashed, insolvent banks were bailed out, the printing presses were turned on, taxes were cut, and public spending was boosted. Some countries devalued their currencies.

As a result, the slide was halted, and the rebound was faster than forecasters expected. But the stimulus measures transformed a banking crisis into a fiscal and sovereign-debt crisis. From 2010 onwards, governments started to raise taxes and cut spending in response to growing fears of sovereign default. At that point, the recovery went into reverse.

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A crisis of capitalism is supposed to create an opening for the political left. But in Europe, the place where the concept of left and right was born, political conservatives have won the bulk of the elections held since economic catastrophe struck in 2008.

Is this about to change?

The conservative victory most noted in the United States was the rise to power of David Cameron, the British prime minister feted at the White House last week. The Conservatives won only a plurality of the parliamentary seats against the Labor Party in the 2010 elections. But they drove Labor to its worst showing since 1983 and were able to put together a coalition government with the center-left Liberal Democrats. Cameron has gotten good press in the United States, even from liberals who wish the American right would follow Cameron’s moderate and modernizing ways.

Cameron’s was not a singular victory. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats were reelected in 2009, and the center-right also prevailed in recent voting in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands — and Sweden, the very heartland of social democracy.

The question is whether 2012 will mark a comeback by a left invigorated by a growing unhappiness with rising economic inequalities and a backlash against austerity policies aimed at saving Europe’s common currency.

The biggest test will come in two rounds of voting on April 22 and May 6 in France, where center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy has been trailing Francois Hollande, a moderate Socialist.

The French election has already presaged a new trans-European ...

Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of “the war to end all wars,” the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielberg’s War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play it’s based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.

In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss.  In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’s novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.

In truth, there’s nothing new in this.  Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.

After ...

With the world’s industrial democracies in crisis, two competing narratives of its sources – and appropriate remedies – are emerging. The first, better-known diagnosis is that demand has collapsed because of high debt accumulated prior to the crisis. Households (and countries) that were most prone to spend cannot borrow any more. To revive growth, others must be encouraged to spend – governments that can still borrow should run larger deficits, and rock-bottom interest rates should discourage thrifty households from saving.

Under these circumstances, budgetary recklessness is a virtue, at least in the short term. In the medium term, once growth revives, debt can be paid down and the financial sector curbed so that it does not inflict another crisis on the world.

This narrative – the standard Keynesian line, modified for a debt crisis – is the one to which most government officials, central bankers, and Wall Street economists have subscribed, and needs little elaboration. Its ...

Great empires rarely succumb to outside attacks. But they often crumble under the weight of internal dissent. This vulnerability seems to apply to the eurozone as well.

Key macroeconomic indicators do not suggest any problem for the eurozone as a whole. On the contrary, it has a balanced current account, which means that it has enough resources to solve its own public-finance problems. In this respect, the eurozone compares favorably with other large currency areas, such as the United States or, closer to home, the United Kingdom, which run external deficits and thus depend on continuing inflows of capital. 

In terms of fiscal policy, too, the eurozone average is comparatively strong. It has a much lower fiscal deficit than the US (4% of GDP for the eurozone, compared to almost 10% for the US).

Debasement of the currency is another sign of weakness that often precedes decline and breakup. But, again, this is not the case for the eurozone, where the inflation rate remains low – and below that of the US and the UK. Moreover, there is no significant danger of an increase, as wage demands remain depressed and the European Central Bank will face little pressure to finance deficits, which are low and projected to disappear over the next few years. Refinancing government debt is not inflationary, as it creates no new purchasing power. The ECB is merely a “central counterparty” between risk-averse German savers and the Italian government.

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Much has been written about Europe’s sluggish growth, but the record is actually not so bad. Over the last ...

What does the New Year hold for the global wave of protest that erupted in 2011? Did the surge of anger that began in Tunisia crest in lower Manhattan, or is 2012 likely to see an escalation of the politics of dissent?

The answers are alarming but quite predictable: we are likely to see much greater centralization of top-down suppression – and a rash of laws around the developed and developing world that restrict human rights. But we are also likely to see significant grassroots reaction.

What we are witnessing in the drama of increasingly globalized protest and repression is the subplot that many cheerleaders for neoliberal globalization never addressed: the power of globalized capital to wreak havoc with the authority of democratically elected governments. From the perspective of global corporate interests, closed societies like China are more business-friendly than troublesome democracies, where trade unions, high standards of human-rights protection, and a vigorous press increase costs.

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It’s called a gang injunction.  A controversial crime tool strategy that some people say should be illegal, and others say is a necessary last resort for communities plagued by violence.   On this edition, we go from the birthplace of gang injunctions in Los Angeles, to their newest use in London, England.  Almost 30 years later, communities remain divided about the best way to address youth violence and crime.

At the just-concluded European Union summit, British Prime Minister David Cameron vented decades of accumulated resentment stemming from his country’s relationship with Europe. Europeans were appalled at how the last-minute injection of finicky points about bank regulation could stymie what was supposed to be a breakthrough agreement on the regulation of EU countries’ budgets. Cameron’s supporters in Britain cheered and portrayed him as a new Winston Churchill, standing up to the threat of a vicious continental tyrant.

The United Kingdom’s view of Europe has always been both emotional and ambiguous. A Conservative government wanted to join the European Economic Community in the early 1960’s, but was rejected by French President Charles de Gaulle. The General mocked the British ambition with a rendition of Edith Piaf’s song about an English aristocrat left out on the street, “Ne pleurez pas, Milord.” In the end, Britain came in from the cold, but British leaders always felt that they were not quite welcome in the European fold.

At two critical moments in the past, a British “no” had a decisive impact on European monetary developments. In 1978, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing proposed an exchange-rate arrangement – the European Monetary System (EMS) – to restore stable exchange rates in Europe. Initially, the Germans and the French negotiated trilaterally, with the UK, in meetings that were slow, cumbersome, and unproductive.

In fact, the talks were sabotaged by British Prime Minister James Callaghan, who started conferring with US President Jimmy Carter about the challenge that the European plan posed to the United States, and how the Anglo-Saxons could respond to the continental threat. As he put it, according to the transcript of one of the phone calls, “with the strength of the German economy, it could be ...

Sweden, the United Kingdom and Germany are the top countries to fight climate change, according to the 2012 Climate Change Performance Index, whose results were published at the United Nations climate change summit today.
 

Sweden, the country with the lowest emission levels of 50,600 tons of CO2 emissions, according to the latest data from the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), and good emission trends worldwide, was ranked 4th. 
 

Experts said they could not award any country with the top three rankings, as no nation was doing enough to prevent climate change. 
 

The three lowest-ranking countries are Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Iran. The index is compiled each year by environmental lobby organization Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network (CAN), which evaluate and compare the climate protection performance of the 58 countries worldwide which are together responsible for more than 90 percent of global energy-related CO2-emissions. 
 

"This year’s results signify that although globally emissions are still growing, none of the big emitters make the real shifts that are needed," said CAN Europe director Wendel Trio. "None of them is considered as doing enough." 
 

Sweden’s climate policy was not ambitious enough, while the UK, ranked 5th, had recently shown worrying signs. It had failed to tighten up its carbon budgets, while Germany’s emission levels remained too high for a placement higher than rank 6. 
 

"The average grades for the national and international policies are weak," said Germanwatch researcher Jan Burck, one of the authors of the ...

It looks as though the eurozone may be in a decisive meltdown, which is just fine in my book. The sooner we get back to francs, lire, punts, drachmas and the rest of the old sovereign currencies, the better.

It used to be as much a part of going to France to change money and be handed a bundle of notes featuring the devious Cardinal Richelieu as choking on Gauloise smoke. Instead, those francs are now replaced by the characterless but somehow always expensive euros.

The argument against the eurozone is that hard-faced Euro-bankers — their killer instincts honed at Goldman Sachs, Wall Street's School of the Americas — have the power to act as the bully-boys of international capital and impose austerity regimes from Dublin to Athens, scalping the poor to bail out the rich.

Now the end of the eurozone does not mean the end of the European Union. They're different. There are 17 nations in the former, 27 in the latter. Britain, for example, has never been in the eurozone, which is why the currency exchange in London will, in return for your worthless dollars, hand you bank notes with the Queen's portrait on them.

At the moment, the European Union has virtually no tax collecting powers. Its annual haul is about 1 percent of the EUs gross domestic product. By comparison, the U.S. government collects about 20 to 24 percent of GDP.

Throughout the entire Eurocrisis, there has been a basso profundo chorus from the Eurocrats that what's needed is a lot more centralizing. In the words of Wolfgang Munchau at the Financial Times on Nov. 28, the EU needs "a fiscal union": "This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well."

I've read many editorial paragraphs with this same bullying timbre — that what the whole European enterprise needs is an ...

Support for ObamaCare has fallen to just 34 percent of the American public, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s most recent tracking poll.  That’s down from 41 percent in just one month.

Can’t say I’m surprised. Just as they did during the debate on health care reform in 2009 and 2010, the special interests who profit from the status quo have been winning the messaging battle in their ongoing effort to scare people away from the new law. They have a well-planned and executed strategy to mislead people so thoroughly they will vote next year for candidates who promise to repeal the law, even if that means they will be voting against their own best interests. The strategy of the law’s backers—if indeed there is one —is simply not working.

One reason reform advocates cite for the decline in support:  relentless attacks on the law by GOP presidential candidates, especially during those free-for-all debates. At one of the recent get-togethers, Newt Gingrich even resurrected the biggest of the big lies —  that the law creates government-run death plans that will decide when to pull the plug on sick Medicare beneficiaries. Supporters can’t expect debate moderators to challenge the candidates on such baseless accusations, and they don’t have comparable forums to communicate how the law is helping millions of Americans. At least not yet.

Another factor in falling support for ObamaCare is that opponents are outdueling  supporters in placement of op-ed commentaries and letters to the editor. While I haven’t seen detailed analyses of the op-ed placement war, my own observation, as someone who reads a lot of newspapers, is that the critics have gotten way more ink than the ...

Since the summer, the continuing installments of the Greek crisis have concealed a worrying process of fragmentation in the eurozone. Indeed, there are several grim indicators of this development.

First, the spread between banks’ borrowing rate and the zero-risk rate has been climbing since July. Financial institutions with liquidity increasingly prefer to deposit their cash with the European Central Bank, which has had to resume its lending to banks. The same thing occurred in the 2007-2008 crisis, though the shift is less acute this time, and is confined to the eurozone. In London and New York, the interbank market is still working; nevertheless, there is reason for concern.

Second, cross-border banks are charging higher interest rates to firms in southern Europe than they are to comparable firms in northern Europe, which is worsening the situation for crisis-hit economies. This fragments Europe’s supposedly unified market. And, instead of combating this trend, northern European regulators are amplifying it by limiting financial institutions’ exposure to southern European banks.

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The United Kingdom is falling apart. And nobody seems to have really noticed. It’s not the riots and the burning buildings, nor the stumbling stock markets. Those fill every front page.

At a slower, less alarming pace, something more profound is happening: The United Kingdom may well be on the verge of breaking up; actually disuniting its disparate parts.

The word “secession” conjures up images of splinter groups, fringe corners of far-flung states agitating for the independence of their often imaginary fiefdoms: Bomb blasts in the Basque region; guns in Grozny.

But in generally less dramatic fashion, Scotland has voted for a Scottish National Party (SNP) government, committed to an independence referendum; a long-cherished dream. Signs of a rift were also on display when Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond complained bitterly about broadcasters heading coverage of the riots as "UK riots" when they were, in fact, English ones alone. Claiming the footage would damage Scotland's reputation as a tourism destination, he told BBC Radio Scotland: "We know we have a different society in Scotland, and one of my frustrations was to see this being described on BBC television and Sky as riots in the UK."

But the friction and current constitutional confusion between the two countries harks back much further, to the Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century; the Culloden massacre and 1747 Act of Proscription, a law that banned the wearing of traditional dress, use of Gaelic, bearing of arms or even enjoyment of traditional music in an attempt by the British government to pacify the “unruly” Scottish clans.

It was a process that author Alastair MacIntosh describes as the final internal colonization of the British Isles; one that saw some half a million people forced off their land in what became known as the Highland Clearances, while remaining clan chiefs were incorporated into the British ...

British Prime Minister David Cameron is backing eviction for public housing tenants who participated in last week's riots. "Let's make sure if people riot and break the law, they get thrown out of their [public subsidized] council houses," Cameron said this weekend.  The first riot-related eviction papers have already been served on an entire family in London.  Meanwhile, former New York and Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton (of "zero tolerance" fame) is being considered as Britain's top cop after the resignation of the chief of the Metropolitan Police over the Murdoch hacking scandal. Before Cameron and the British go down this Murdoch-media fueled path to mass incarceration and collective punishment, they'd do well to spend ten minutes with Michelle Alexander, legal scholar and author of "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness." Getting tough the US way has created a caste-like closed-system in which ex-felons are discriminated against in housing and employment  - forever.  "If your family lives in public housing they risk eviction if you even go home to visit. If you're a drug offender you can be denied food stamps in some states, for the rest of your life, and for the rest of your life, when you apply for employment you have to check that box whether the felony is three weeks or thirty years old." What does this system accomplish? It returns people right back to prison. "Which ...