There's an eerie foreshadowing to some of the author's musings from 54 years ago.

Aldous Huxley—author of the classic Brave New World, little-known children's book wordsmith, staple of Carl Sagan's reading list—would have been 118 today.

To celebrate his mind and his legacy, here is a rare 1958 conversation with Mike Wallace—the same masterful interviewer who also offered rare glimpses into the minds of Salvador Dalí and Ayn Rand—in which Huxley predicts the "fictional world of horror" depicted in Brave New World is just around the corner for humanity.

There's an eerie foreshadowing to some of the author's musings from 54 years ago.

He explains how overpopulation is among the greatest threats to our freedom, admonishes against the effects of advertising on children, and, more than a century before Occupy Wall Street, outlines how global economic destabilization will incite widespread social unrest. Use the following link to view the video. More

 

 

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The bailout of the 99% by the 99%

Why should the 1% get all the bailouts? Now, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot has launched an exciting project called Rolling Jubilee that lets you turn a little cash into a helping hand for folks who deserve it a lot more than Bank of America does.

Here's the deal. Jubilee is an ancient biblical tradition in which, periodically, debts were forgiven, slaves were freed and slates were wiped clean. It was a time for starting afresh, of renewal. Now, Rolling Jubilee takes that concept to a new level. According to their website, it works like this:

Banks sell debt for pennies on the dollar on a shadowy speculative market of debt buyers who then turn around and try to collect the full amount from debtors. The Rolling Jubilee intervenes by buying debt, keeping it out of the hands of collectors, and then abolishing it. We’re going into this market not to make a profit but to help each other out and highlight how the predatory debt system affects our families and communities. Think of it as a bailout of the 99% by the 99%.

Millions of working people are still haunted by the debt they ran up while trying to stay afloat during the Great Recession. And while the government doled out hundreds of billions of dollars to big corporations and too-big-to-fail banks, normal folks have been pretty much left to fend for themselves.

By wiping out this debt, Rolling Jubilee spares thousands of hard-pressed people the agonies of getting pursued by aggressive collection agencies, many of whom use abusive, illegal practices to try and extract money from people who might be struggling to get back on their feet after losing a job, falling ill or other personal disasters.

So far, Rolling Jubilee says it's collected nearly $300,000 in donations, enough to extinguish more than $5m in debt. The group hopes to grow a broad debt resistance movement – and help build a non-exploitative economy that works for everybody.

Learn more: This trailer for the documentary film Maxed Out features professor (now, newly elected US senator) Elizabeth Warren explaining the predatory practices of banks and credit card companies. Then, if that doesn't make you angry enough, check out this ABC News expose of outrageous practices in the collections industry. More

 

Third Northwest activist jailed for staying silent

“Today is October 10th, 2012, and I am ready to go to prison,”announced 24-year-old Leah-Lynn Plante yesterday. By Thursday morning, the Portland activist was in custody and could remain incarcerated in a U.S. federal prison for 18 months, although she has not been charged with a crime.

Along with two others in the Pacific Northwest, Plante was remanded into federal custody for her refusal to provide a grand jury testimony regarding activists in the region. Matt Duran and Kteeo Olejnik were jailed in previous weeks for, like Plante, refusing to cooperate with a grand jury. All three are now being held in U.S. federal prison, not because they are being punished for crime, but, as the National Lawyers Guild’s executive director Heidi Boghosian told me earlier this year, “to coerce cooperation.”

Writing for Truth-Out in August about the Northwest grand juries and those resisting cooperation, I noted that grand juries “are among the blackest boxes in the federal judiciary system.” The closed-door procedures are rare instances in which an individual loses the right to remain silent. As was the case with the Northwest grand juries resistors, the grand jury can grant a subpoenaed individual personal immunity; Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination are therefore protected, but silence is not. In these instances, refusal to speak can be considered civil contempt. Non-cooperators can be jailed for the 18-month length of the grand jury. More

 

Judge throws out mass Occupy Chicago arrests as unconstitutional

The mass arrests of Occupy Chicago demonstrators that city leaders praised as a model for respecting protesters' rights were ruled unconstitutional Thursday by a Cook County judge who also declared that the city's overnight park curfew violates the First Amendment.

The city singled out the Occupy demonstrators for violating the park's 11 p.m. curfew on two consecutive weekends in October 2011, arresting hundreds of people, but made no arrests when 500,000 people stayed past the curfew at the 2008 election night rally for President Barack Obama "that electrified the world," Associate Judge Thomas M. Donnelly wrote.

That selective enforcement of the curfew, combined with the Chicago Police Department's harassment of the protesters in the days leading up to the arrests, supports "a finding that the city intended to discriminate against defendants based on their views," Donnelly wrote.

The immediate impact was to throw out the arrests of 92 Occupy protesters on charges related to violating the curfew. But the judge went beyond that in staking out his opinion that the city is violating the public's right to free assembly under the state and U.S. constitutions by restricting late-night access to Chicago's most famous lakefront park, which he called "the quintessential public forum."

Noting the park's long history of political rallies going back to Abraham Lincoln, the judge quoted early city leaders who resolved in 1835 that the land that would become Grant Park "should be reserved for all time to come for a public square, accessible at all times to the people." Because parks are a critical forum for free speech and free assembly, local ordinances restricting access to them must be "narrowly tailored" to serve a specific "government interest," such as park maintenance, Donnelly wrote.

"We're incredibly pleased by Judge Donnelly's ruling. This is a significant First Amendment ruling for the Occupy protesters, and all Chicagoans," said lawyer Thomas A. Durkin, who represented 12 University of Chicago students who were among the 92 arrested.

City lawyers plan to appeal and do not think the judge's ruling affects the 11 p.m.-to-6 a.m. curfew in Grant Park or other city parks, said Law Department spokesman Roderick Drew. More