Scarecrow's favorite diner

Rosebud Diner, Davis Square in Somerville, MA (photo: Coeli)

The coffee’s freshly ground, there’s a wide variety of teas and the sticky buns are homemade.

It’s a mixed bag this morning.

  • Free Bradley Manning!! “US army prosecutors claim to have found email correspondence between alleged WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning and Julian Assange, the founder of the whistleblowing website.”
  • “The president of the European Central Bank (ECB), Mario Draghi, has said he has “no doubts” about the euro’s ability to survive the current crisis. Speaking to the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, he was asked about a Financial Times interview in which he warned of the costs of a eurozone break-up.”
  • “Incoming Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy today gave a preview of his plans to cut the budget deficit, clean up the banking sector and reform the labor market in Spain, the Wall Street Journal reported. Spain currently has an unemployment rate of nearly 23 percent, and its overall debt was 706.34 billion euros ($919.6 billion), or 66 percent of GDP, at the end of September, The Associated Press reported.”
  • “Members of the Occupy London protest movement have won the right to stay in an office block belonging to the investment bank UBS over the Christmas and New Year period after a High Court judge granted them leave to take their case to the Court of Appeal.”
  • “Dozens of army deserters have been shot dead by Syrian troops as they tried to flee their bases and join anti-government protests, reports say.”
  • “Phone hacking was “routine” at the Sun and News of the World, the late Sean Hoare, who worked at both News International titles, told his brother before his death, the Leveson inquiry has heard.”
  • From Real News: “Climate Change and the Failure of Market Mechanisms. Patrick Bond: Carbon markets failing and Durban Green Climate Fund doomed – up to activists now.”
  • “US officials said their 10-month-long secret talks with Afghanistan’s Taliban to reach a peace deal have reached a critical juncture, Reuters reported.”

Editorial cartoon

“…[political scientist James C] Scott insists that the cries of ‘bread’ and ‘land’ so often at the core of peasant resistance arise from ‘The basic material needs of the peasant household.’ More generally,

‘[t]o require of lower-class resistance that it somehow be “principled” or “selfless” is not only utopian and moral slander on the moral status of fundamental material needs; it is, more fundamentally, a misconstruction of the basis of class struggle…. “Bread-and-butter” issues are the essence of lower-class politics and resistance.’ ”

Wobblies and Zapatistas, Staughton Lynd & Andrej Grubacic, PM Press, Oakland, 2008, pp 131-2

The truth will set you free but first it’ll piss you off.