All Entries in the "Fascism, Police State, Authoritarianism" Category
The Big Lie: : How Ideologues Smeared Fannie Mae
So this is how the Big Lie works.
You begin with a hypothesis that has a certain surface plausibility. You find an ally whose background suggests that he’s an “expert”; out of thin air, he devises “data.” You write articles in sympathetic publications, repeating the data endlessly; in time, some of these publications make your cause their own. Like-minded congressmen pick up your mantra and invite you to testify at hearings.
You’re chosen for an investigative panel related to your topic. When other panel members, after inspecting your evidence, reject your thesis, you claim that they did so for ideological reasons. This, too, is repeated by your allies. Soon, the echo chamber you created drowns out dissenting views; even presidential candidates begin repeating the Big Lie.
Thus has Peter Wallison, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, almost single-handedly created the myth that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac caused the financial crisis. His partner in crime is another A.E.I. scholar, Edward Pinto, who a very long time ago was Fannie’s chief credit officer. Pinto claims that as of June 2008, 27 million “risky” mortgages had been issued — “and a lion’s share was on Fannie and Freddie’s books,” as Wallison wrote recently. Never mind that his definition of “risky” is so all-encompassing that it includes mortgages with extremely low default rates as well as those with default rates nearing 30 percent. These latter mortgages were the ones created by the unholy alliance between subprime lenders and Wall Street. Pinto’s numbers are the Big Lie’s primary data point.
Full Story Here: The Big Lie – NYTimes.com.
Tax Reform Coalition: Huge Corporations Gear Up For Upcoming Tax Battle
Huge U.S. corporations are forming lobbying groups to try to influence what could become the hottest congressional debate over comprehensive tax reform in a generation.
The newest organization calls itself the Tax Reform Coalition. Backed by companies including American Express Co and Xerox Corp, it filed paperwork with Congress this week to register as a lobbying group.
The coalition’s registration suggests it will have a broad portfolio, lobbying on “issues related to corporate tax reform,” but no one involved would answer questions on Friday.
It joins an increasingly crowded playing field of lobbying groups and politicians strategizing for what Washington will look like in 2013 following national elections in November 2012.
Full Story Here: Tax Reform Coalition: Huge Corporations Gear Up For Upcoming Tax Battle.
A Christmas Message From America’s Rich
Matt Taibbi
It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.
True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.
But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.
Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
Full Story Here: A Christmas Message From America’s Rich | | Rolling Stone.
The Wall Street System is Destroying Not Serving Society
Joseph Stiglitz :-:
A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around
Forget monetary policy. Re-examining the cause of the Great Depression—the revolution in agriculture that threw millions out of work—the author argues that the U.S. is now facing and must manage a similar shift in the “real” economy, from industry to service, or risk a tragic replay of 80 years ago.
t has now been almost five years since the bursting of the housing bubble, and four years since the onset of the recession. There are 6.6 million fewer jobs in the United States than there were four years ago. Some 23 million Americans who would like to work full-time cannot get a job. Almost half of those who are unemployed have been unemployed long-term. Wages are falling—the real income of a typical American household is now below the level it was in 1997.
We knew the crisis was serious back in 2008. And we thought we knew who the “bad guys” were—the nation’s big banks, which through cynical lending and reckless gambling had brought the U.S. to the brink of ruin. The Bush and Obama administrations justified a bailout on the grounds that only if the banks were handed money without limit—and without conditions—could the economy recover. We did this not because we loved the banks but because (we were told) we couldn’t do without the lending that they made possible. Many, especially in the financial sector, argued that strong, resolute, and generous action to save not just the banks but the bankers, their shareholders, and their creditors would return the economy to where it had been before the crisis. In the meantime, a short-term stimulus, moderate in size, would suffice to tide the economy over until the banks could be restored to health.
Full Story Here: Joseph Stiglitz: “A Banking System is Supposed to Serve Society, Not the Other Way Around” | Politics | Vanity Fair.
Eliot Spitzer: Our Rallying Cry Should Be, “We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America’s Worst Behavior.”
If the public exercised its ownership capacity by influencing board member selection, compensation, and political donations, then these companies would be fundamentally altered.
As the year ends, American politics remains mired in the agenda of the right. The House is, at least momentarily, refusing to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits—two policies genuinely beneficial to the middle class. And the presidential campaign heading into the Iowa primaries is dominated by the libertarianism of Ron Paul and the astonishing, appalling ideas—eliminate child labor laws, for instance—of Newt Gingrich.
Yes, Occupy Wall Street changed the debate for a brief spell, and, yes, President Obama harkened back to the glory days of progressivism with his Kansas speech. But in general American politics has lost sight of the most important crisis of our generation: the shrinking middle class.
So let me offer some advice to Democrats and progressives seeking to capture the attention of the American people. It has long been my belief that ownership trumps regulation. What I mean by that is while laws and regulations can create boundaries to behavior, the reality, as we have seen after passing much legislation—Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank—is that even good laws leave room for bad decision making that results in cataclysm. Even though prosecutors should have charged many more bad actors on Wall Street, much of what led to the crisis was not blatant illegality: It was horrific judgment exercised by senior executives and regulators.
Full Story Here: Eliot Spitzer: Our Rallying Cry Should Be, “We Own Wall Street and We Can Stop Corporate America’s Worst Behavior.” | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.
Propagandizing for Perpetual War
Are Our Rulers Stupid, or Do They Think We’re Stupid?
According to the Congressional Research Service, the United States has appropriated $806 billion for the direct cost of invading and occupying Iraq. Including debt service since 2003, that sum rises to approximately $1 trillion. The White House estimates the number of U.S. military wounded at 30,000; the web site icasualties.org states that U.S. military fatalities from the Iraq war now stand at 4484. It is impossible to estimate precisely the numbers of Iraqi civilian deaths, but they are frequently cited as being in excess of 100,000. There are now around two million internally displaced Iraqis in a country of 30 million inhabitants. As United States armed forces (but not up to 17,000 State Department employees, contractors and mercenaries) leave the country, Iraq is plunging into a sectarian and ethnically-fueled political crisis. Even if it survives that crisis and remains a unitary state, it will almost certainly be pulled closer to the orbit of Iran, our bogeyman du jour.
In view of the crippling costs both human and financial as well as the strategic and moral disaster the invasion of Iraq precipitated, what sort of verdict do you think our leaders – leaders representing a presidential administration ostensibly opposed to the invasion and promising hope and change – bother to offer us? While junketing in Turkey on December 17, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told the press the following:
As difficult as [the Iraq war] was, I think the price has been worth it, to establish a stable government in a very important region of the world.
Full Story Here: Propagandizing for Perpetual War » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.
The Corporations That Occupy Congress
David Cay Johnston :-:
Some of the biggest companies in the United States have been firing workers and in some cases lobbying for rules that depress wages at the very time that jobs are needed, pay is low, and the federal budget suffers from a lack of revenue.
Last month Citizens for Tax Justice and an affiliate issued “Corporate Taxpayers and Corporate Tax Dodgers 2008-10″. It showed that 30 brand-name companies paid a federal income tax rate of minus 6.7 percent on $160 billion of profit from 2008 through 2010 compared to a going corporate tax rate of 35 percent. All but one of those 30 companies reported lobbying expenses in Washington.
Another report, by Public Campaign, shows that 29 of those companies spent nearly half a billion dollars over those three years lobbying in Washington for laws and rules that favor their interests. Only Atmos Energy, the 30th company, reported no lobbying.
Full Story Here: The Corporations That Occupy Congress | Common Dreams.
Georgia ‘Birther’ suit attempts to remove Obama from 2012 ballot
According to Dustin Baker of the blog Georgia Politico, a suit has been filed with the office of Georgia’s Secretary of State Brian Kemp challenging Barack Obama’s legitimacy to appear as a presidential candidate on the ballot in the November 2012 elections.
Georgia State Representative J. Mark Hatfield (R-Waycross) will plead the case before the Office of State Administrative Hearings on behalf of Mr. Kevin R. Powell of Duluth, Georgia, who filed the suit on the grounds that “Obama does not satisfy the ‘natural born Citizen’ requirement of Article II, Section I, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution. Obama’s father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a native of Kenya and a British subject who never became a United States citizen.”
Presumably the lawsuit does not address the question of the nationality of President Obama’s mother, whose status as a U.S. citizen would confer citizenship upon her son, no matter the nationality of his father.
Full Story Here: Georgia ‘Birther’ suit attempts to remove Obama from 2012 ballot | The Raw Story.
House Committee Delays Vote On Disastrous Internet Bill
SOPA Vote Delayed, Allowing For More Corporate Fundraising From Censorship Bill
After two days of debate, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) abruptly halted a key hearing on the Stop Online Piracy Act, postponing a Committee vote on the bill until 2012. The move marks a win for hordes of internet activists who oppose the bill, but gives lawmakers another opportunity to juice deep-pocketed corporations for campaign contributions.
“This is a huge victory for everyone who uses the Internet — and proof that millions of people speaking out can still make a difference in a Congress usually run by corporate lobbyists,” said Aaron Swartz, co-founder of Reddit and Demand Progress, an organization that has staunchly opposed the bills for months.
SOPA is being aggressively pushed by Hollywood movie studios, major record labels and luxury goods providers as an effort to crackdown on internet piracy of their products. But the tools envisioned are so extreme that tech experts warn the legislation threatens the very functionality of the Internet. The ACLU and other free-speech groups emphasize that by authorizing the federal government and corporations to shut down entire websites without a trial for posting just a single piece of copyright-infringing content, the bill would sharply curb the exercise of free speech onlin
Full Story Here: SOPA Vote Delayed, Allowing For More Corporate Fundraising From Censorship Bill.
Indefinite Military Detention Measure Passes On Bill Of Rights Day
The Senate passed a defense bill Thursday that authorizes indefinite detentions of American terrorism suspects, coincidentally acting on the controversial measure on the 220th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
The bill, the National Defense Authorization Act, passed 86 to 13 and is expected to be signed quickly by President Obama, who withdrew a veto threat against the bill Wednesday. Six Democrats, six Republicans and one independent opposed the bill.
Though the legislation passed overwhelmingly, several senators argued that it was threatening fundamental provisions of the Bill of Rights, which is celebrated every Dec. 15.
Full Story Here: Indefinite Military Detention Measure Passes On Bill Of Rights Day.
PA GOPer Admits There’s No Evidence That Voter ID Laws Are Needed, But He’s Ramming One Through Anyway
In the wake of the 2010 elections, numerous GOP-controlled states have adopted so-called “voter ID” laws to target the entirely fabricated problem of in-person voter fraud. Such voter fraud is so uncommon that a voter is 39 times more likely to be struck by lightning than to actually commit fraud at the polls. Yet because these laws also disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in demographics that tend to support Democrats, they have become the darling of GOP lawmakers.
So it is much more disappointing than surprising that Pennsylvania’s Republican Gov. Tom Corbett is now pressuring lawmakers in his state to enact one of these vote suppressing laws, despite the fact that a top GOP lawmaker admits that there is no proof that these vote suppressing laws are needed:
Full Story Here: PA GOPer Admits There’s No Evidence That Voter ID Laws Are Needed, But He’s Ramming One Through Anyway | ThinkProgress.
The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy
John Nichols :-:
Billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch finally got their way in 2011. After their decades of funding the American Legislative Exchange Council, the collaboration between multinational corporations and conservative state legislators, the project began finally to yield the intended result.
For the first time in decades, the United States saw a steady dismantling of the laws, regulations, programs and practices put in place to make real the promise of American democracy.
That is why, on Saturday, civil rights groups and their allies will rally outside the New York headquarters of the Koch brothers to begin a march for the renewal of voting rights in America.
For the Koch brothers and their kind, less democracy is better. They fund campaigns with millions of dollars in checks that have helped elect the likes of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Ohio Governor John Kasich. And ALEC has made it clear, through its ambitious “Public Safety and Elections Task Force,” that while it wants to dismantle any barriers to corporate cash and billionaire bucks’ influencing elections, it wants very much to erect barriers to the primary tool that Americans who are not CEOs have to influence the politics and the government of the nation: voting.
Full Story Here: The Koch Brothers, ALEC and the Savage Assault on Democracy | The Nation.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: Stop Bashing the Rich
Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, is railing against bashing the rich.
Dimon was responding to a question at an investor conference about the hostile political environment towards banks.
“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and that everyone who is rich is bad — I just don’t get it,” said Dimon at the conference, which was organized by Goldman Sachs [GS 105.13 
3.97 (+3.92%)
Big banks, and CEOs like Dimon, have come under fire from Occupy Wall Street and other protesters who are disgruntled about income inequality and feel that big corporations — financial institutions in particular — have undue influence on government. In fact, last month, the protesters in New York targeted Dimon specifically, marching to his apartment and the residences of other wealthy New Yorkers.
Full Story Here: JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon: Stop Bashing the Rich – US Business News – CNBC.
Hartmann: The Poison Pill to kill the Post Office?
The financial woes of the United States Postal Service can be traced all the way back to 2006. In tonight’s Daily Take – I’ll tell you what happened that year – and why the Republican Party is hell bent on destroying one of the legacies of Ben Franklin.
How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street
The Republican Governors Association met this week in Florida to give GOP state executives a chance to rejuvenate, strategize and team-build. But during a plenary session on Wednesday, one question kept coming up: How can Republicans do a better job of talking about Occupy Wall Street?
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about “income inequality” and “paying your fair share.”
Yahoo News sat in on the session, and counted 10 do’s and don’ts from Luntz covering how Republicans should fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.
Full Story Here: How Republicans are being taught to talk about Occupy Wall Street | The Ticket – Yahoo! News.
Walker intends to charge citizens fee to protest
Free speech is getting expensive in Wisconsin.
Following demonstrations earlier this year which drew up to 100,000 people to the Wisconsin Capitol, Republican Gov. Scott Walker has proposed new policies that would require future protesters to pay in advance to stage an event, at a cost of $50 per hour, per Capitol Police officer.
Police may also require a liability insurance or a bond, according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal.
Demonstrators will also be on the hook for any damage and cleanup following protests. Walker’s administration had claimed that the pro-union protests earlier this year had costs as much as $7.5 million, but later admitted that the actual costs were far less.
Under the new policy, permits will be required for groups of four or more people who want to do any activity inside the Capitol. Groups of 100 or more gathering outside the Capitol must also apply for a permit 72 hours in advance. Police will have some leeway if unforeseen events lead to spontaneous gatherings.
Full Story Here: Walker intends to charge citizens fee to protest | The Raw Story.
Jerry Brown And The Occupy Movement: Where Does The Governor Really Stand?
In mid-November, a group of demonstrators aligned with the Occupy movement held a rally outside a Sacramento loft building in an attempt to capture the attention of one of its residents: Jerry Brown. They were angry about the harsh tactics that police had been using against demonstrators throughout the state, and they wanted the governor to hear them out. But they weren’t there to excoriate him or to demand his resignation, as their counterparts in other cities and states have done with other elected officials from Oakland’s Mayor Jean Quan to New York’s Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“Gov. Brown, we challenge you to take up the fight with Occupy,” declared demonstrator Kevin Carter. “We occupy for the First Amendment, free speech, peaceful assembly and the redress of grievances against the government. As the governor, you should lead this fight.”
They were asking, it appeared, for the governor to join them.
Previously, Occupy demonstrators strenuously resisted attempts by politicians to use the movement as a platform, even to the point of turning away Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the revered Civil Rights activist, when he tried to speak out of turn at a general assembly in Atlanta.
Full Story Here: Jerry Brown And The Occupy Movement: Where Does The Governor Really Stand?.
7-7-7: Jobless? Face It. Obama’s Not That Into You
Forget Herman Cain’s 9-9-9. The battle cry for every American ought to be 7-7-7.
7-7-7: for the $7.7 trillion the Bush and Obama Administrations secretly funneled to the banksters.
Remember the $700 billion bailout that prompted rage from right to left? Which inspired millions to join the Tea Party and the Occupy movements? Turns out that that was a mere drop in the bucket, less than a tenth of what the Federal Reserve Bank doled out to the big banks.
Bloomberg Markets Magazine reports a shocking story that emerged from tens of thousands of documents released under the Freedom of Information Act: by March 2009, the Fed shelled out $7.77 trillion “to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.”
The U.S. national debt is currently a record $14 trillion.
Full Story Here: 7-7-7: Jobless? Face It. Obama’s Not That Into You | Common Dreams.
House Votes To End Public Funding Of Presidential Campaigns
House Republicans pushed through legislation on Thursday that would end public financing of presidential campaigns and terminate the Election Assistance Commission, the agency charged with helping states carry out fair elections.
The vote, 235 to 190, went right down the party line, with just one Republican — Rep. Walter Jones (N.C.) — joining with all Democrats in opposition.
The bill doesn’t have much of a future: It isn’t likely to come up in the Democrat-controlled Senate, and the White House released a strongly worded statement against it. But that didn’t stop the House from spending hours on it anyway — and it led to Democrats charging Republicans with trying to chip away at voter protections for disenfranchised groups.
Full Story Here: House Votes To End Public Funding Of Presidential Campaigns.
OPS: More proof that the republican are fascist. This is a blatant attempt to kill ‘We The People”
Senate Kills Effort To Ban Indefinite Military Detentions Of U.S. Citizens
Senators compromised Thursday on a bill that attempts to spell out the military’s right to detain Americans indefinitely, killing a bid to bar the practice but passing an amendment that says current laws on the matter stand.
The provision in the National Defense Authorization Act aimed to codify a string of court cases and current anti-terrorism practices involved in the capture and treatment of terrorism suspects. It initially opened what opponents saw as the prospect of letting the military haul away any citizen about whom it had suspicions.
The new amendment specifies that the current practices may not change, although it also says explicitly that the military can pursue Americans at home.
“Nothing in this section shall be construed to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United States,” says the compromise amendment, which passed 99 to 1.
Full Story Here: Senate Kills Effort To Ban Indefinite Military Detentions Of U.S. Citizens.
The Spy Files: WikiLeaks releases surveillance docs
WikiLeaks has released the first portion of sensitive data revealing a new global surveillance and interception industry spanning 25 countries.
Site founder Julian Assange has held a press conference, revealing the secrets of the industry.
The whistleblowing site has published some 287 documents from its huge database, collected from 160 international intelligence contractors. The database includes internal documents of such companies like Gamma corporation in the UK, Ipoque of Germany, Amesys and Vupen in France, VASTech in South Africa, ZTE Corp in China, Phoenexia in the Czech Republic, SS8 and Blue Coat in the US, among others.
And this was only the first step of the WikiLeaks Spy Files project, established to expose companies, which are making billions of dollars selling sophisticated tracking and surveillance tools. They published an interactive map of surveillance companies operating around the globe.
Full Story Here: The Spy Files: WikiLeaks releases surveillance docs — RT.
Representative Schakowsky Receives Letter of Intimidation From Former Blackwater CEO
Rep. Jan Schakowsky’s (D-Illinois) attempt to end the multimillion dollar business of outsourcing in Iraq and Afghanistan doesn’t sit well with the former CEO of the notorious Blackwater company, Erik Prince, who sent a hand-delivered cease-and-desist letter to the Congresswoman threatening legal action if she continued to make “false and defamatory” statements about him.
The Stop Outsourcing Security Act, introduced in 2007 by Schakowsky, would target numerous companies like the former Blackwater, now XE Services, to be eventually phased out to end the misappropriation of government functions and unaccountable abuses by contractors.
Though Schakowsky recognizes that this decision would impact numerous companies, she singled out Blackwater’s bloody record as a “company that has become synonymous with misconduct” in a speech on the House floor Wednesday, and said that the letter constituted “attempted intimidation” by Prince.
Full Story Here: Representative Schakowsky Receives Letter of Intimidation From Former Blackwater CEO | Truthout.
Drones cleared for domestic use across the US
What do you know about drones? You know drones — those robotic, unmanned planes that fire missiles for the American military across Afghanistan, Pakistan and anywhere else the United States needs to get away with murder.
Well if you don’t know too much, don’t worry, that’ll change soon. The Federal Aviation Administration is looking into rules that will bring the controversial aircraft into the country, creating an United States airspace buzzing with tiny, robot planes to look over every inch of American soil — and maybe more.
An article published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times reveals that new drone planes could be coming domestically quite soon, as both law enforcement and the agricultural sector are seeing benefits in keeping an arsenal of unmanned planes ready to patrol the skies. For farmers, drones could bring a new method of pumping pesticides into fields of crops from above; for the cops, the aircraft could conduct surveillance over suspected criminals (think police chopper but remote controlled). The Times reports that utility companies see a benefit in drones as well, giving them a new set of eyes to monitor oil, gas and water pipelines.
Full Story Here: Drones cleared for domestic use across the US — RT.
The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loan – Now Do You Understand Occupy Wall Street?
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.
Full Story Here: The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loan – Now Do You Understand Occupy Wall Street? – YouTube.
Senators Demand the Military Lock Up of American Citizens in a “Battlefield” They Define as Being Right Outside Your Window
While nearly all Americans head to family and friends to celebrate Thanksgiving, the Senate is gearing up for a vote on Monday or Tuesday that goes to the very heart of who we are as Americans. The Senate will be voting on a bill that will direct American military resources not at an enemy shooting at our military in a war zone, but at American citizens and other civilians far from any battlefield — even people in the United States itself.
Senators need to hear from you, on whether you think your front yard is part of a “battlefield” and if any president can send the military anywhere in the world to imprison civilians without charge or trial.
The Senate is going to vote on whether Congress will give this president—and every future president — the power to order the military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians anywhere in the world. Even Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) raised his concerns about the NDAA detention provisions during last night’s Republican debate. The power is so broad that even U.S. citizens could be swept up by the military and the military could be used far from any battlefield, even within the United States itself.
Senate to Vote on Bill That Allows the US Military to Capture Civilians Anywhere in the World Without Charges or Trial, and More
Thom Hartmann :-:
You need to know this. Now more than 24 hours past their eviction deadline – Occupy L.A. is still camped outside of City Hall – and patriots are turning to the courts to keep it that way. According to the Los Angeles Times, Occupy L.A. filed a court complaint yesterday arguing that the city’s looming crackdown represents an “unconstitutional deprivation of access to [the] traditional public forum…for first amendment activity.” Occupy L.A. is also attacking “anti-camping” laws – claiming that police are selectively enforcing the law – arresting people with the Occupy movement for camping – but letting more than 500 people camp out without a permit just weeks ago while they waited for the new “Twilight” movie to open. After the NYPD raided Zuccotti Park two weeks ago – a judge ruled that camping gear is not an expression of free speech – thus allowing the city to ban people from bringing sleeping bags and tarps into public parks – effectively killing any chance of rebuilding the Occupy Wall Street community. Apparently we live in a nation where the courts have ruled that little green pieces of fabric – money – is a form of free speech, but big green pieces of fabric – tents – are not.
Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) called for the U.S. Federal Reserve to be reformed after Bloomberg reported the central bank secretly loaned nearly $8 trillion to financial institutions from 2007 to 2009.
Tens of thousands of documents obtained by Bloomberg under the Freedom of Information Act showed that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion in profits thanks to the low-interest loans. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley accounted for $4.8 billion of that total.
“Remember the great debate we had here over the 700 billion in TARP funds?” he said on the House floor Tuesday. “There was no debate over the 7.7 trillion the Fed gave the banks.”
Full Story Here: Kucinich: Federal Reserve has captured control of our government | The Raw Story.
Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate
The Senate is set to vote this week on a Pentagon spending bill that could usher in a radical expansion of indefinite detention under the U.S. government. A provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would authorize the military to jail anyone it considers a terrorism suspect — anywhere in the world — without charge or trial. The measure would effectively extend the definition of what is considered the military’s “battlefield” to anywhere in the world, even within the United States. Its authors, Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, have been campaigning for its passage in a bipartisan effort. But the White House has issued a veto threat, with backing from top officials including Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and FBI Director Robert Mueller. “This would be the first time since the McCarthy era that the United States Congress has tried to do this,” says our guest, Daphne Eviatar of Human Rights First, which has gathered signatures from 26 retired military leaders urging the Senate to vote against the measure, as well as against a separate provision that would repeal the executive order banning torture. “In this case, we’ve seen the administration very eagerly hold people without trial for 10-plus years in military detention, so there’s no reason to believe they would not continue to do that here. So we’re talking about indefinite military detention of U.S. citizens, of lawful U.S. residents, as well as of people abroad.”
Full Story Here: Battlefield America: U.S. Citizens Face Indefinite Military Detention in Defense Bill Before Senate.
The Fed Works for Banks, Not The Rest of America
A Revelation; The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans –
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.
Kucinich also called threats by ratings agency to downgrade U.S. debt a threat to our national sovereignty.
Full Story Here: A Revelation; The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans – The Fed Works for Banks, Not The Rest of America | Common Dreams.
OPS: and WHO was surprised by this?
A Revelation- The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans
Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a longtime advocate for reform of the Federal Reserve, is sharply criticizing the Federal Reserve today after Bloomberg news reported that the Federal Reserve secretly committed nearly $8 trillion in support to American and international financial institutions during the 2008 bailout. Kucinich recorded a video for his website before going to the floor of the House of Representatives to call upon Congress to reclaim its Constitution primacy over monetary policy.
Full Story Here: A Revelation- The Fed Grants $7.77 Trillion in Secret Bank Loans – YouTube.
Alan Grayson : Money For (Almost) Nothing
11-28-11 2 – Money For (Almost) Nothing, with Alan Grayson – Countdown with Keith Olbermann
Full Story Here: 11-28-11 2 – Money For (Almost) Nothing, with Alan Grayson – Countdown with Keith Olbermann – YouTube.
Former AIG CEO Sues Claiming Taxpayers Need To Pony Up $25 Billion More
For many years, insurance behemoth AIG was so poorly managed that the American taxpayer eventually had to invest nearly $70 billion in the incompetently run company to prevent its collapse from taking the entire U.S. economy along with it (much of this money has since been repaid). Former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg, however, thinks that the American people haven’t done enough to protect his massive fortune, so his company filed a lawsuit demanding even more taxpayer money:
Starr International, the company run by the former head of insurance giant American International Group (AIG), has filed a $25 billion lawsuit against the federal government, arguing that the takeover of the insurance company at the height of the financial crisis was unconstitutional.
When the government took an 80 percent interest in AIG during the financial crisis, it did so without “due process or just compensation,” in violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, according to the suit filed Monday in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.
Full Story Here: Former AIG CEO Sues Claiming Taxpayers Need To Pony Up $25 Billion More | ThinkProgress.
OPS: The Fascist Oligarchy speaks
The People’s Surveillance State
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
- George Orwell
In the aftermath of September 11, there was a big push to create a national surveillance system in the name of national security. Cameras were installed at traffic lights, ostensibly to catch people running red lights and stop signs, but those cameras came with a nifty side benefit: they recorded everyone within reach of the lens in their comings and goings. Cameras were installed at street corners, ostensibly to provide security against crime, but again, you were recorded wherever you went. Bank machines all come with security cameras, and those added to the ever-broadening web of national surveillance. Finally, almost every cell phone now comes with software that, so long as the thing is turned on, can track your every step by triangulating your position via GPS and the cell towers your phone signal bounces off of.
Full Story Here: The People’s Surveillance State | Truthout.
Tampa Police Roll Out A TANK To Deal With A Few Dozen Protesters
According to The Daily, the Tampa police produced this vehicle to deal with some protesters.
Overkill, much?
(As many folks have observed on Twitter, these sorts of responses are playing right into the protesters’ hands.)
UPDATE: It’s not actually a “tank,” of course, though it certainly looks like one. It’s a “12-ton armored personnel carrier.” It is supposedly for “rescue” operations, though why it needs to be armored to do that is not clear
Full Story Here: Tampa Police Roll Out A TANK To Deal With A Few Dozen Protesters – Business Insider.
OPS: Looks like the Tampa police win the award for the biggest cowards.
Internet Blacklist Bill on Fast-Track Toward Becoming Law
Internet piracy has not ceased to boil the blood of entertainment industry heavy weights since Napster allowed nominally savvy users to widely share music online without a penny going back to major record labels. The distributors of movies and music largely located in Hollywood have not adapted to the new age of information sharing, and instead continue to lobby for legislation to restrict the ability for internet users to consume their content online for free. Two bills under consideration in the House and the Senate are born of this tension between new media and old, the better known is the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA. SOPA, introduced by Texas Congressman Lamar Smith,
Full Story Here: uprisingradio.org » Internet Blacklist Bill on Fast-Track Toward Becoming Law.
Banks near record spending on D.C. lobbyists
The money banks spend on lobbying is on pace to reach a record high again this year as the industry battles to weaken or repeal hundreds of rules being crafted by federal regulators.
Lobbying outlays by the five biggest spenders in the commercial banking sector increased 12 percent in the first three quarters of 2011 over the same period last year, an Observer analysis of federal lobbying disclosure records shows.
Wells Fargo in particular is turning into a major player in Washington. The San Francisco-based bank’s spending on lobbying is up 80 percent in the first three quarters of the year, compared with the same period in 2010.
Full Story Here: Banks near record spending on D.C. lobbyists | McClatchy.
Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street
A well-known Washington lobbying firm with links to the financial industry has proposed an $850,000 plan to take on Occupy Wall Street and politicians who might express sympathy for the protests, according to a memo obtained by the MSNBC program “Up w/ Chris Hayes.”
The proposal was written on the letterhead of the lobbying firm Clark Lytle Geduldig & Cranford and addressed to one of CLGC’s clients, the American Bankers Association.
CLGC’s memo proposes that the ABA pay CLGC $850,000 to conduct “opposition research” on Occupy Wall Street in order to construct “negative narratives” about the protests and allied politicians. The memo also asserts that Democratic victories in 2012 would be detrimental for Wall Street and targets specific races in which it says Wall Street would benefit by electing Republicans instead.
According to the memo, if Democrats embrace OWS, “This would mean more than just short-term political discomfort for Wall Street. … It has the potential to have very long-lasting political, policy and financial impacts on the companies in the center of the bullseye.”
Full Story Here: Lobbying Firm’s Memo Spells Out Plan to Undermine Occupy Wall Street | Common Dreams.
It’s not just our leaders who are in a crisis. Democracy itself is failing
The world’s statesmen no longer shape events but merely respond to them, in thrall to market forces
Are the following intimations of a global crisis in the legitimacy of western democracy? Ireland’s confidential budget plan, unseen by the Irish electorate, is leaked by European finance officials to the German parliament where the proposals are examined by the German finance committee.
In Italy, Mario Monti, the country’s unelected new prime minister and a former international adviser to Goldman Sachs, stands in the Giustiniani Palace as head of a cabinet of similarly unelected technocrats. Imposed in place of the corrupt, useless and seedy Silvio Berlusconi to satisfy the “markets”, Monti promises what we are told the markets want, and that is “sacrifices”.
In Greece, both left and right of the country unite against their own technocrat, the former head of Greece’s Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, brought in, too, at the behest of the markets. And in Berlin on Friday, David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative party, which could not manage to secure a mandate to govern the UK on its own, sits down with a German chancellor, Angela Merkel, whose countrymen do not trust her to handle the eurozone crisis.
Full Story Here: It’s not just our leaders who are in a crisis. Democracy itself is failing | Peter Beaumont | Comment is free | The Observer.
How Wall Street Rally Views the Protesters
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes just aired an exclusive that provides an interesting look at how some of those being targeted by Occupy Wall Street may really view the protests. He reported that a memo from a prominent corporate lobbying firm to the American Bankers Association proposed an extensive public relations campaign — including opposition research into key movement figures and an elaborate media strategy — designed to discredit the movement, and Dems who embrace it.
The memo was authored by lobbyists at the firm Clark Lytle Geduldig Cranford — and there are two key takeaways. The first is that some allies of Wall Street firms see Occupy Wall Street as a potential long term political threat. The second is that they see the Democratic strategy of embracing the populist message of the protests as something that could work, rather than something that is an automatic negative for Dems, as conservatives keep proclaiming is the case.
From the memo:
Full Story Here: How Wall Street Rally Views the Protesters | Common Dreams.
Occupy Oakland: footage shows police beating ‘peaceful’ Iraq war veteran
Oakland police investigating after ex-marine Kayvan Sabehgi suffered a ruptured spleen in apparently unprovoked incident
Video footage has emerged of a police officer beating an Iraq war veteran so hard that he suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked incident at a recent Occupy protest in California.
The footage, which has been shared with the Guardian, shows Kayvan Sabehgi standing in front of a police line on the night of Occupy Oakland‘s general strike on 2 November, when he is set upon by an officer.
He does not appear to be posing any threat, nor does he attempt to resist, yet he is hit numerous times by an officer clad in riot gear who appears determined to beat him to the ground.
Video at link below
Full Story Here: Occupy Oakland: footage shows police beating ‘peaceful’ Iraq war veteran | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Think Again: Billionaire Media Moguls vs. Occupy Wall Street
Hundreds of police officers, many wearing riot helmets, marched into lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park early Tuesday morning to clear out the Occupy Wall Street protesters. The operation required boroughwide task forces and “scores of mobile officers who are usually used to flood high-crime neighborhoods.” According to the police, 142 people were arrested, largely for “disorderly conduct and resisting arrest,” though it turned out that according to a judge’s ruling, the police did not have the right to clear the park at all, but merely to dispose of its tents and sleeping bags.
The first thing the police did was clear out the journalists so that they could not see what was going on—just as they routinely do in totalitarian nations. At least 10 reporters were arrested. Ironically, the owners of at least three New York newspapers could not have been happier. Of course, all three are not merely members of “the one percent” but the 1 percent of the 1 percent.
The Daily News, owned by billionaire real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, cheered “Bravo to Bloomberg’s Occupy Wall Street eviction from Zuccotti Park, [for] finally reclaiming public space from unsanitary shantytown.” He added: “What they [the protesters] need to overcome is a sense that they occupy a higher moral ground than everyone else and are entitled to the privilege of behaving obnoxiously.”
Full Story Here: Think Again: Billionaire Media Moguls vs. Occupy Wall Street.
Occupiers Occupied: The Hijacking of the First Amendment
Robert Reich :-:
A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.
First things first. The Supreme Court’s rulings that money is speech and corporations are people have now opened the floodgates to unlimited (and often secret) political contributions from millionaires and billionaires. Consider the Koch brothers (worth $25 billion each), who are bankrolling the Tea Party and already running millions of dollars worth of ads against Democrats.
Such millionaires and billionaires aren’t contributing their money out of sheer love of country. They have a more self-interested motive. Their political spending is analogous to their other investments. Mostly they want low tax rates and friendly regulations.
Full Story Here: Robert Reich.
SOPA, The Internet Censorship Bill, Was Lauded By Both Parties In Key House Hearing
At a House Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans joined together to voice support for legislation that would criminalize much of the activity that occupies the Internet. The bipartisan bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act would establish major new powers for corporations intent on corralling copyrighted materials — powers that would lead to big legal bills for start-ups and Silicon Valley giants alike.
SOPA’s Senate counterpart, the PROTECT IP Act, was already voted out of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September.
Both political parties — flush with campaign contributions from Hollywood studios and trial lawyers — are eager to pass the legislation. The Senate version, introduced in May, has broad support, but has been held up by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). Without Wyden’s hold, the legislation looks certain to pass by a landslide. The House version, introduced last month, was written by House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and co-sponsored by ranking member John Conyers (D-Mich.).
Full Story Here: SOPA, The Internet Censorship Bill, Was Lauded By Both Parties In Key House Hearing.
Are Mayors Across The Country Coordinating To Uproot The Occupations?
Across the country, a number of mayors have ordered their police forces to move in and uproot 99 Percenters occupying town squares, parks, and other public spaces to call attention to income inequality and other social problems. In recent weeks, we’ve seen evictions in cities ranging from Oakland to Portland to New York City.
Now, evidence has emerged that these mayors may be coordinating their evictions of protesters. Speaking on a BBC radio show, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan says she was recently on a conference call with 18 cities dealing with 99 Percent occupations and that they were discussing how to handle the situation:
QUAN: I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation where what had started as a political movement and political encampment ended up being an encampment of the people who started them.
The radio show The Takeaway captured the exchange in the following clip (skip to 5:30):
Full Story Here: Are Mayors Across The Country Coordinating To Uproot The Occupations? | ThinkProgress.
Tom Coburn: $30 Billion In Millionaires Aid Is ‘Sheer Washington Stupidity’
Millionaires are receiving billions in taxpayer-funded support every year that helps them pay for everything from child care to bad debts to boats and vacation homes, according to a report released Monday by Sen. Tom Coburn.
People who individually earned more than a million dollars in 2009 even managed to collect a total of nearly $21 million in unemployment insurance.
“From tax write-offs for gambling losses, vacation homes, and luxury yachts to subsidies for their ranches and estates, the government is subsidizing the lifestyles of the rich and famous,” wrote Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, in an accompanying letter. “Multimillionaires are even receiving government checks for not working. This welfare for the well-off — costing billions of dollars a year — is being paid for with the taxes of the less fortunate.”
Calling the giveaways “sheer Washington stupidity,” Coburn detailed in the study more than $30 billion a year that comes out of the U.S. Treasury to aid people who make more than a million a year.
Full Story Here: Tom Coburn: $30 Billion In Millionaires Aid Is ‘Sheer Washington Stupidity’.
Conservatives Plot to Burn, Shred, and Sabotage Scott Walker Recall Effort
| Mother Jones:-:
A group of self-identified conservatives say they plan to sabotage the effort to recall Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker, which begins on Tuesday, by burning and shredding recall petitions they’ve collected and misleading Wisconsinites about the recall process.
These plans, discussed in Facebook posts that were first reported by the blog PolitiScoop, entail posing as recall supporters and gathering signatures, only to later destroy the petitions. They also include telling Wisconsinites that they can only sign one recall petition (which is false—they can sign different petitions as long as they each correspond to a different organization) and directing signature collectors to the homes of registered sex offenders. (Requests for comment were sent to each of the Facebook posters who allowed messages from other users.)
In one post, Will R. Jenkins says, “I’ll be able to destroy 15-20K signatures.” If things go well, he adds, he might even “be able to destroy upwards of 15-20% of the entire collected ballots in the state of Wisconsin”:
Full Story Here: Conservatives Plot to Burn, Shred, and Sabotage Scott Walker Recall Effort | Mother Jones.
California Refuses to Accept Obama’s Banking Sellout
There is no three-strikes law for crooked bankers, not even a law for a fifth strike, as The New York Times reported in the case of Citigroup, cited last month in a $1 billion fraud case. Unlike the California third-striker I once wrote about whom a district attorney wanted banished forever to state prison for stealing a piece of pizza from the plate of a person dining outdoors, Citigroup executives get off with a fine and by offering a promise not to do it again, and again and again.
As the Times reported when Citigroup agreed to settle SEC charges last month: “Citigroup’s main brokerage subsidiary, its predecessors or its parent company agreed to not violate the very same antifraud statue in July 2010. And in May 2006. Also as far back as March 2005 and April 2000.”
Not that the bankers face prison time, since the Justice Department has refused to act in these cases, and the Securities and Exchange Commission is bringing only civil charges, which the banks find quite tolerable. This time, the fine against Citigroup was $285 million, which may sound like a lot except that the bank raked off as much as $700 million on this particular toxic securities deal. As the Bloomberg news service editorialized, “… there should be only one answer from Jed S. Rakoff, the federal judge in New York assigned to weigh the merits of the agreement: You’ve got to be kidding.”
Full Story Here: California Refuses to Accept Obama’s Banking Sellout | Truthout.
Want more evidence conservatives are TRYING to crash the economy?
| Thom Hartmann :-:
Want more evidence conservatives are TRYING to crash the economy – consider this. The Republican-controlled House of Representative will once again vote on – and likely pass – a so-called “balanced budget amendment” in the next week. The BBA as they call it – will immediately cut trillions of dollars out of the budget – and then make it nearly impossible to ever raise taxes again. And – it will crash our economy.
According to a new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities – the Republican BBA would, “throw about 15 million more people out of work, double the unemployment rate from 9 percent to approximately 18 percent, and cause the economy to shrink by about 17 percent instead of growing by an expected 2 percent.” We can add those horrific economic numbers to the 370,000 jobs that have already been lost this year thanks to Republican budget cuts. And as we saw in last night’s debate – with the global economy headed into full meltdown mode – not one candidate said they’d lift a finger to stop it – aside from Herman Cain who thinks his 9-9-9 plan can stop anything.
Luckily- as Tuesday’s election showed – the American people are waking up to just how bad the conservative agenda is for the nation.
Full Story Here: Want more evidence conservatives are TRYING to crash the economy? | Thom Hartmann – News & info from the #1 progressive radio show.
Greg Palast Tracks the Vultures of the 1 Percent: A Truthout Interview
Near the front of his new book, “Vultures’ Picnic,” Greg Palast quotes BuzzFlash at Truthout as calling him “a cross between Seymour Hersh and Jack Kerouac.” He also quotes a White House spokesman as saying about him, “We hate that sonovabitch.”
During its first several years, Palast was the most interviewed resource on BuzzFlash. That was and is because he drives the global elite crazy, not to mention the mainstream corporate media.
He’s a one-person investigative junk yard dog, who chomps down and doesn’t let go. He’s indefatigable, as the subtitle of his book indicates, “in pursuit of petroleum pigs, power pirates, and high-finance carnivores.”
Full Story Here: Greg Palast Tracks the Vultures of the 1 Percent: A Truthout Interview | Truthout.
The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen
Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That’s why we’re nearly bankrupt
If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren’t responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.
The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. “The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.” Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.
Full Story Here: The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.
Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind
David and Charles Koch, oil tycoons with strong right-wing views and connections, look set to tighten their grip on US politics
The secretive oil billionaires the Koch brothers are close to launching a nationwide database connecting millions of Americans who share their anti-government and libertarian views, a move that will further enhance the tycoons’ political influence and that could prove significant in next year’s presidential election.
The database will give concrete form to the vast network of alliances that David and Charles Koch have cultivated over the past 20 years on the right of US politics. The brothers, whose personal wealth has been put at $25bn each, were a major force behind the creation of the tea party movement and enjoy close ties to leading conservative politicians, financiers, business people, media figures and US supreme court judges.
The voter file was set up by the Kochs 18 months ago with $2.5m of their seed money, and is being developed by a hand-picked team of the brothers’ advisers. It has been given the name Themis, after the Greek goddess who imposes divine order on human affairs.
Full Story Here: Koch brothers: secretive billionaires to launch vast database with 2012 in mind | World news | guardian.co.uk.
Understanding the Banking Crisis : “Too Big to Fail”
Ed McCartin, a former governor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, shares his experience of the financial services industry. This series of short lectures examines credit risks in the growing derivatives markets, mortgage-backed securities, how the Feds reluctance to regulate US banks and zero interest rate policy affects working Americans.
Full Story Here: Understanding the Banking Crisis (Part 1): “Too Big to Fail” – YouTube.
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IPjbZFgLsU
Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FakZia8sCOA
Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUSyoPcYRds
Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXQGxC6gYAw
Oligarchy, American Style
Paul Krugman :-:
Inequality is back in the news, largely thanks to Occupy Wall Street, but with an assist from the Congressional Budget Office. And you know what that means: It’s time to roll out the obfuscators!
Anyone who has tracked this issue over time knows what I mean. Whenever growing income disparities threaten to come into focus, a reliable set of defenders tries to bring back the blur. Think tanks put out reports claiming that inequality isn’t really rising, or that it doesn’t matter. Pundits try to put a more benign face on the phenomenon, claiming that it’s not really the wealthy few versus the rest, it’s the educated versus the less educated.
So what you need to know is that all of these claims are basically attempts to obscure the stark reality: We have a society in which money is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few people, and in which that concentration of income and wealth threatens to make us a democracy in name only.
Full Story Here: Oligarchy, American Style – NYTimes.com.
Lawmakers Aim to Stop Pentagon Cuts if Deficit Panel Fails
As pessimism mounted this week over the ability of a bipartisan Congressional committee to agree on a deficit-reduction plan, lawmakers began taking steps to head off the large cuts in Pentagon spending that would automatically result from the panel’s failure.
Members of both parties and both chambers said they increasingly feared that the 12-member committee would be unable to bridge deep partisan divisions and find $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction as required under the law that raised the debt ceiling and created the committee in the summer.
As talks sputtered, one panel member publicly lamented that the process was not working, and the group was chastised by a bipartisan group of budget experts at a public hearing for failing to show progress. Several members of Congress, especially Republicans on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, are readying legislation that would undo the automatic across-the-board cuts totaling nearly $500 billion for military programs, or exchange them for cuts in other areas of the federal budget.
Full Story Here: Lawmakers Aim to Stop Pentagon Cuts if Deficit Panel Fails – NYTimes.com.
How Wall Street Occupied America
During the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains in 1890, populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease exclaimed, “Wall Street owns the country…. Money rules…. Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The [political] parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.”
She should see us now. John Boehner calls on the bankers, holds out his cup and offers them total obeisance from the House majority if only they fill it. Barack Obama criticizes bankers as “fat cats,” then invites them to dine at a pricey New York restaurant where the tasting menu runs to $195 a person.
That’s now the norm, and they get away with it. The president has raised more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and private equity managers than any Republican candidate, including Mitt Romney. Inch by inch he has conceded ground to them while espousing populist rhetoric that his very actions betray.
Let’s name this for what it is: hypocrisy made worse, the further perversion of democracy. Our politicians are little more than money launderers in the trafficking of power and policy—fewer than six degrees of separation from the spirit and tactics of Tony Soprano.
Full Story Here: How Wall Street Occupied America | The Nation.
The Republican ‘voter fraud’ fraud
| Diane Roberts <br>
All over the US, GOP lawmakers have engineered schemes to make voting more difficult. Well, if you can’t win elections fairly…
Presidential candidate and angry white man Newt Gingrich seems nostalgic for the good old Jim Crow poll tax days: he has called for people to have to pass an American historical literacy test before they can vote. His colleagues on the anti-democratic right have not gone quite so far, but 38 states, most of them controlled by Republicans, are concocting all kinds of ingenious ways to suppress the vote. A new report from New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice says that more than five million people – enough to swing the 2012 presidential election – could find themselves disenfranchised, especially if they’re poor or old or students or black or Latino.
Hyper-conservative governors and legislators, working with templates produced by a shady cabal called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), have pushed through laws to cut the number of voting days, impede groups registering new voters, demand proof of citizenship and otherwise make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Alec, partly funded by the John Birch-er billionaire Koch brothers and affiliated with Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge, is on a mission to shrink not just government (which it regards as a cancer on capitalism), but democracy itself. Ion Sancho, elections supervisor of Leon County, Florida, and veteran of Florida’s 2000 presidential election fiasco, says: “Every state that has a Republican legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida. It’s a national effort.”
Full Story Here: The Republican ‘voter fraud’ fraud | Diane Roberts | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
From Cairo to New York, Which Side Are Police On?
As the Arab Spring enters a tense autumn chill, Tahrir Square remains a fiery political battleground, where struggles between the people and the state constantly churn and redefinine themselves. When police officers went on strike in October, they raised hard questions about the position of the public sector in the struggle against counterrevolution.
Thousands of Egypt’s police, though tarnished by the shameful violence deployed by security forces during the January 25 uprising, are now staging their own revolt. Meanwhile, the military brass, initially lauded in the early days of the revolution when it refrained from crushing demonstrators on behalf of Mubarak’s dictatorship, have become the target of public vitriol. The chaos—part of a continual wave of strikes, demonstrations and crackdowns—illustrates the people’s growing bitterness at the hijacking of their revolution by a reactionary junta.
So are the cops defecting to join the rabble? The momentum comes from struggling rank-and-file officers who actively distance themselves from the corrupt interim regime and notoriously cruel Interior Ministry. Alongside basic bread-and-butter grievances about wages and working conditions—the crux of all the strikes that have rocked the country this year—there are calls for an internal overhaul to restore the integrity and credibility of the institution.
Full Story Here: From Cairo to New York, Which Side Are Police On? | Common Dreams.
Mayor says 32 schools willing to take incentives to increase length of school day
Mayor Rahm Emanuel said the teachers union’s efforts to block additional elementary schools from adopting a longer school day is akin to “cheating children out of an education.”
His comments came during a Thursday press conference promoting new financial incentives for charters willing to adopt a 7 1/2 hour school day.
Full Story Here: Mayor says 32 schools willing to take incentives to increase length of school day – Chicago Tribune.
OPS: A Koch Brothers ‘Democrat’. And a Fascist Bastard.
Is Goldman Sachs Poised to Takeover Europe?
Goldman Sachs is about to take over Europe, but you wouldn’t know it by reading the papers.
On Tuesday, G-Sax alum, Mario Draghi, will take the helm at the European Central Bank replacing retiring ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet. The appointment has slipped by the media virtually unnoticed even though the ECB is the most powerful institution in the EU and is likely to play a critical role in solving the debt crisis.
Draghi was formally a Managing Director at Goldman. He also served as an advisor to the Bank of Italy in 1990, chairman of the Italian Committee for Privatisations, and was an Executive Director of The World Bank from 1984 to 1990. His bio. affirms his globalist pedigree which makes him the perfect candidate to replace the curmudgeonly Trichet who failed to comply with all of Big Finance’s demands. That’s not likely to be the case with Draghi.
Full Story Here: Is Goldman Sachs Poised to Takeover Europe? » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names.
Cops caught infiltrating the Occupy movement
Sign this petition to get money out of politics for good: http://www.getmoneyout.com/
Full Story Here: Cops caught infiltrating the Occupy movement – YouTube.
Washington Post Discards All Journalistic Standards In Attack on Social Security
News outlets generally like to claim a separation between their editorial pages and their news pages. The Washington Post has long ignored this distinction in pursuing its agenda for cutting Social Security, however it took a big step further in tearing down this barrier with a lead front page story that would have been excluded from most opinion pages because of all the inaccuracies it contained.
The basic premise of the story, as expressed in the headline (“the debt fallout: how Social Security went ‘cash negative’ earlier than expected”) and the first paragraph (“Last year, as a debate over the runaway national debt gathered steam in Washington, Social Security passed a treacherous milestone. It went ‘cash negative.’”) is that Social Security faces some sort of crisis because it is paying out more in benefits than it collects in taxes. [The "runaway national debt" is also a Washington Post invention. The deficits have soared in recent years because of the economic downturn following the collapse of the housing bubble. No responsible newspaper would discuss this as problem of the budget as opposed to a problem with a horribly underemployed economy.]
This “treacherous milestone” is entirely the Post’s invention, it has absolutely nothing to do with the law that governs Social Security benefit payments. Under the law, as long as their is money in the trust fund, then Social Security is able to pay full benefits. There is literally no other possible interpretation of the law.
Full Story Here: Washington Post Discards All Journalistic Standards In Attack on Social Security | Beat the Press.
Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed
Robert Scheer :-:
It is class warfare. But it was begun not by the tear-gassed, rain-soaked protesters asserting their constitutionally guaranteed right of peaceful assembly but rather the financial overlords who control all of the major levers of power in what passes for our democracy. It is they who subverted the American ideal of a nation of stakeholders in control of their economic and political destiny.
Between 1979 and 2007, as the Congressional Budget Office reported this week, the average real income of the top 1 percent grew by an astounding 275 percent. And that is after payment of the taxes that the superrich and their Republican apologists find so onerous.
Those three decades of rampant upper-crust greed unleashed by the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s will be well marked by future historians recording the death of the American dream. In that decisive historical period the middle class began to evaporate and the nation’s income gap increased to alarming proportions. “As a result of that uneven growth,” the CBO explained, “the distribution of after-tax household income in the United States was substantially more unequal in 2007 than in 1979: The share of income accruing to higher-income households increased, whereas the share accruing to other households declined. … The share of after-tax household income for the 1 percent of the population with the highest income more than doubled. …”
Full Story Here: Robert Scheer: Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed – Robert Scheer’s Columns – Truthdig.
Report: Democrats’ Super Committee Proposal Is Far To The Right Of All Other ‘Bipartisan’ Compromises
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is out with a damning new analysis of the Democrats’ $3 trillion deficit proposal to the super committee. Republicans have already rejected the plan, despite the fact that it “stands well to the right of plans by the co-chairs of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson commission and the Senate’s ‘Gang of Six,’ and even further to the right of the plan by the bipartisan Rivlin-Domenici commission,” Robert Greenstein, Richard Kogan, and Paul N. Van de Water argue.
“The Democratic plan contains substantially smaller revenue increases than those bipartisan proposals while, for example, containing significantly deeper cuts in Medicare and Medicaid than the Bowles-Simpson plan,” they point out. Look:
Full Story Here: Report: Democrats’ Super Committee Proposal Is Far To The Right Of All Other ‘Bipartisan’ Compromises | ThinkProgress.
Corporate Greed is Running the Country
Video: Senator Bernie Sanders with Ed Schultz
Full Story Here: MSNBC: Corporate Greed is Running the Country – YouTube.
FBI “Mapping”: Racial Profiling on a People-Wide Scale
Until the events of 9/11, Black America seemed to be winning lots of battles in the fight against racial profiling. The term “Driving While Black” had become almost a household word due to heavy media exposure of wildly disproportionate stops of Black drivers by police on Interstate highways. Racial profiling had become politically and socially unacceptable, with few public advocates even among law and order Republicans. And then the Twin Towers came down. Almost instantaneously, racial profiling was back, with a vengeance – directed most dramatically against people who “appeared” to be Muslim, whatever that looks like, but with renewed vigor against African Americans, the historical targets. The FBI, which was never a respecter of the rights of darker peoples, repositioned itself to aggressively pre-empt any threat to national security. That means going after people even when there is no evidence of a crime. Although it remained against the rules for FBI agents to launch investigations based solely on race, religion of ethnicity, those factors could be taken into account. It was a loophole big enough to drive a busload of Knights of the Ku Klux Klan through. By asserting that certain racial, religious and ethnic groups – Blacks, Muslims (especially Black Muslims) and Latinos – were more prone to crime and acts of terror, the FBI cold justify all manner of methods to massively penetrate these groups in the interest of national security.
Full Story Here: FBI “Mapping”: Racial Profiling on a People-Wide Scale | Black Agenda Report.
Obama Admin Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests – Even To The Courts
One of the President Obama’s first promises after becoming President of the United States was a commitment to usher in a new era of unprecedented government transparency . Instead the Obama administration has exhibited what may be an unprecedented obsession with government secrecy including blocking numerous law suits by invoking the doctrine of “State Secrets.” The administration has even come up with an interpretation of the Patriot Act which many in Congress who have seen it claim is overly broad and bestows more power on the Executive Branch than was intended by Congress when they passed it.
Unfortunately those in Congress who have seen this document are not permitted to divulge its content, and we, the public, cannot see it because the administration has chosen to classify it as a “State Secret.” In other words, you might be doing something that the Obama Administration believes violates the Patriot Act, but you won’t know it until they indict you for breaking a law you did not know existed (I might be breaking it just by penning and publishing this article).
Now the Obama/Holder Justice Department is attempting to re-write the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), empowering or even compelling government agencies to deny the very existence of records they know to exist if they believe they are legitimately exempted from disclosure. Of course they are most likely the sole arbiter of whether they are indeed exempt from disclosure. In effect the Obama/Holder Justice Department wants to be free to legally lie about the existence of records in response to FOIA requests. Apparently they want to avoid the embarrassment and inconvenience of being officially rebuked by the courts for doing exactly that (lying to a Federal judge), as occurred earlier this year when, in a strongly worded opinion, U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney wrote that the “Government cannot, under any circumstance, affirmatively mislead the Court.” The solution is simple: re-write the law so the government, in many circumstances, can affirmatively mislead the court.
Full Story Here: OpEdNews – Article: Obama Admin Seeks Permission To Lie In Response To Freedom Of Information Requests – Even To The Courts.
OWS’s Beef: Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating
| Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone :-:
I was at an event on the Upper East Side last Friday night when I got to talking with a salesman in the media business. The subject turned to Zucotti Park and Occupy Wall Street, and he was chuckling about something he’d heard on the news.
“I hear [Occupy Wall Street] has a CFO,” he said. “I think that’s funny.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “Why is that funny?”
“Well, I heard they’re trying to decide what bank to put their money in,” he said, munching on hors d’oeuvres. “It’s just kind of ironic.”
Full Story Here: OWS’s Beef: Wall Street Isn’t Winning It’s Cheating | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone.
It’s true, bankers really do control the world: study
Here’s a gift to Occupy Wall Street protesters around the world: you now have scholarly proof that banks control the world.
Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, also known as ETH, have published a paper that argues just 147 companies account for a large chunk of the total economic value of all the transnational companies around the world. No exact dollar figures, but it’s obviously a vast sum.
Among the top 50 corporations, 45 operate within the financial industry. Barclays PLC is the most powerful, according to the ETH study, followed by such well-known names as JPMorgan Chase & Co., UBS AG, and Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
The United States takes home first prize with 24 companies cracking the researchers’ top 50 list, followed by the U.K. with 8, France with 5, Japan with 4, and Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands tying with 2 companies each. Canada has one company in the researchers’ top 50: Sun Life Financial, Inc. secures the 35th spot.
Full Story Here: It’s true, bankers really do control the world: study – The Globe and Mail.
Wartime Contracting Panel Seals Records for Next 20 Years
Established by Congress to investigate and expose government waste, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has decided to not reveal its volumes of materials to the public for another two decades.
After three years of work, the commission officially shut down last week, having concluded that the U.S. misspent between $31 billion and $60 billion in contracting for services in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But it won’t allow its records to be opened for public review at the National Archives until 2031, because some of the documents contain “sensitive information,” according to one official.
Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told The Wall Street Journal that the 20-year term “seems like a long period of time, particularly for a commission whose whole purpose is to improve accountability and expose waste.”
Full Story Here: AllGov – News – Wartime Contracting Panel Seals Records for Next 20 Years.
Falling for New Neocon Propaganda
Ray McGovern :-:
One not-so-funny fact about Washington is that nearly all the news media stars who fell for neoconservative falsehoods about Iraq are still around to fall for new ones on Iran, even some like Richard Cohen who briefly regretted his earlier gullibility, notes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Paul R. Pillar, my former colleague in the CIA’s analytical division, has raised a warning flag, cautioning that the same imaginative neocon composers who came up with the various refrains on why we needed to attack Iraq are now providing similar background music for a strike on Iran.
He is right. And as one of my Russian professors used to say, “This is nothing to laugh!”
Full Story Here: Falling for New Neocon Propaganda | Truthout.
Privatizing Police Work
Fighting crime is expensive. And if you’re a small town with diminishing resources, the price of public safety can often be a heavy but necessary burden. One small town in Minnesota is attempting to slash its costs by outsourcing their police work to a private security firm.
KARE-TV reports that the town of Foley, about 60 miles outside of Minneapolis, has handed over its police work to General Security Services Corporation, a private security provider that serves private homes, companies, commercial areas and government buildings. Full-time patrols will begin in January.
The town of about 2,600 had previously been relying on sheriff’s deputies from Benton County, who would patrol the city for 17.1 hours a day at a monthly cost of about $23,000 a month. The new deal with General Security Services will cost $98,500 for six months, or about $7,000 less per month than the cost of the sheriff’s deputies.
Full Story Here: Privatizing Police Work – Neighborhoods – The Atlantic Cities.
New Book Chronicles “Oligarchy”
JEFFREY WINTERS, winters at northwestern.edu
Author of the new book Oligarchy, Winters said today: “By choosing Wall Street as the origin of their action, and by focusing on the gap separating the 1% from 99%, the Occupy movement has hit upon the chronic problem of oligarchy and democracy in America. The power of concentrated wealth has overwhelmed and effectively disenfranchised the majority of American citizens. One person/one vote will be meaningless in U.S. politics unless the distorting power of wealth is addressed. Failing to do so could result in a deep crisis of legitimacy in American democracy.”
Winters is professor of political economy at Northwestern University and just wrote the piece “Oligarchy and Democracy” in the new issue of the American Interest, which states: “Measured by income, oligarchs at the very top of American society have an MPI [Material Power Index] just over 10,000, which happens to approximate the MPI of Roman senators relative to their society of slaves and farmers. …
“Over the course of the 20th century, two wrenching things happened within American democracy and oligarchy that together constitute the Great American Inversion. First, early in the century, steep new income taxes were imposed exclusively on the rich. By the end of the century, these same tax burdens had been shifted from the richest Americans to the various strata below them.
Full Story Here: New Book Chronicles “Oligarchy” | Accuracy.Org.
Why Obama May Be About to Give a Giant Handout Out to the Billionaire Koch Brothers
The brothers control nearly 25% of the tar sands crude that is imported into the US and own mining companies, oil terminals, and refineries all along the Keystone XL route.
Here’s a unique political strategy for you: in the lead up to a crucial election, as anti-corporate sentiment is sweeping the nation, consider giving a huge handout to a major corporation that happens to be your biggest political enemy and is already spending hundreds of millions to defeat you and your agenda.
If that seems too crazy to believe, welcome to the Obama 2012 campaign.
Right now, President Obama is faced with the most crucial environmental decisions he is going to face before the 2012 election: whether or not to approve the permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, a 1,700 mile fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the continent, the Canadian tar sands.
The Keystone XL isn’t just an XL environmental disaster — the nation’s top climate scientists say that fully exploiting the tar sands could mean “essentially game over” for the climate — it also happens to be an XL sized handout to Big Oil and, you guessed it, the Brothers Koch. You want fries with that?
Full Story Here: Why Obama May Be About to Give a Giant Handout Out to the Billionaire Koch Brothers | Environment | AlterNet.
NEW BETTER MARKETS RESEARCH REPORT SHOWS WALL STREET DRIVING UP FOOD, FUEL PRICES
Better Markets today released a new research report showing speculative commodity trading pushed by Wall Street is causing market disruptions that have increased prices for American families and farmers.
The analysis reviews commodity markets data over the last 27 years and shows that, since 2005, so-called commodity index funds have triggered an upward price curve in the futures markets when they trade out of an expiring month contract and into a new future month (referred to as the “roll”). This has resulted in rising prices and costs as well as a boom-and-bust cycle by changing the incentives of producers and consumers of commodities. It also has sent misleading and non-fundamental price signals to the market, which have disrupted the futures and physical commodity markets.
“This research report analyzes commodity market activity for more than 25 years and specifically analyzed speculative commodity index fund trading,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Markets. “This is the first study to directly isolate the impact of the speculative index fund roll trading. The data shows the trading those funds do every month has severely disrupted and dramatically changed those markets, causing food and fuel prices to increase, hedging costs for businesses to rise, and prices to swing erratically up and down, which also raises everyone’s costs.”
“When this research and data is considered with Better Markets’ prior research on speculation, the need to ban commodity index funds is overwhelming,” said Mr. Kelleher.
Full Story Here: NEW BETTER MARKETS RESEARCH REPORT SHOWS WALL STREET DRIVING UP FOOD, FUEL PRICES | Better Markets.
Hartmann: Will Corporations get the Right to Commit Genocide?
Ian Millhiser, Center for American Progress joins Thom Hartmann. Is the Supreme Court about to give corporations the right to commit genocide? Believe it or not – that may happen. The High Court has agreed to hear the case of Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum which could give corporations immunity from any lawsuits for their employees murdering, raping, or torturing people in the areas where they’re drilling for oil or fielding mercenary armies – just as long as they’re carrying out the atrocities under the heading of corporate business.
Full Story Here: Hartmann: Will Corporations get the Right to Commit Genocide? – YouTube.
Will The Senate Kill Net Neutrality?
Campaign Director of Free Press, Tim Karr, talks about how the Senate may be close to killing Net Neutrality.
Audio at link
Full Story Here: Tim Karr: Will The Senate Kill Net Neutrality? – YouTube.
America’s Real Industrial Policy: Maximize Profits at All Cost
The Occupy Wall Street movement—which has gained the support of 54 percent of Americans, according to a Time poll—has, remarkably, apparently inspired free-marketeer House Majority Leader Eric Cantor to address America’s Pakistan-level inequality in speech on Friday.
Cantor intends to explain how to uplift “a single working mom…a small business owner…and how we make sure the people at the top stay there.” (The last category, of course, has seemingly been the entire purpose of Cantor’s political career.)
The OWS movement’s core concern is growing inequality, and how to lessen it. Many protesters advocate for more progressive tax policies. Another crucial way to fight inequality, which activists haven’t focused on as much, is keeping good-paying jobs in the United States. In my opinion, the movement ought to directly challenge the president and leading Democrats on whether they are serious about preserving America’s productive base and raising the incomes of working families who are part of the 99 percent. Will these political leaders support a concerted “industrial policy” to achieve these critical goals, or will they side with Corporate America as jobs disappear, wages keep plunging and inequality reaches new heights?
Full Story Here: America’s Real Industrial Policy: Maximize Profits at All Cost – Working In These Times.
Federal Reserve and Bank of America Initiate a Coup to Dump [$75 TRILLION !!] Dollars of Losses on the American Taxpayer
Bloomberg reports that Bank of America is dumping derivatives onto a subsidiary which is insured by the government – i.e. taxpayers.
Yves Smith notes:
If you have any doubt that Bank of America is going down, this development should settle it …. Both [professor of economics and law, and former head S&L prosecutor] Bill Black (who I interviewed just now) and I see this as a desperate move by Bank of America’s management, a de facto admission that they know the bank is in serious trouble.
The short form via Bloomberg:
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation…
Bank of America’s holding company — the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit — held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.
That compares with JPMorgan’s deposit-taking entity, JPMorgan Chase Bank NA, which contained 99 percent of the New York-based firm’s $79 trillion of notional derivatives, the OCC data show.
Full Story Here: Federal Reserve and Bank of America Initiate a Coup to Dump Billions of Dollars of Losses on the American Taxpayer | ZeroHedge.
Millionaires and corporations are using tax breaks to help sway public opinion
Since the late 19th century, the very rich have been paying people to demand less government. The work of Herbert Spencer, for example, was sponsored by Andrew Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison. Spencer believed that society changed according to evolutionary laws. Humans were evolving towards perfection, but this process was inhibited by interference from the state. By protecting people from the consequences of their own actions (or their own bad luck), it stopped the winnowing process that would otherwise result in the survival of the fittest.
Social security, publicly funded education, compulsory vaccination, laws enforcing safety at work all interrupted social evolution. But a self-regulated free market would swiftly ensure that those who were best adapted would survive and triumph. It’s not hard to see why the millionaires loved him. They saw themselves as winners of the evolutionary race, taking their rightful place at the pinnacle of the social order. Any attempt to limit their freedoms would prevent society from achieving perfection.
Today, sponsorship by millionaires and corporations explains why free-market thinktanks outnumber and outspend the thinktanks arguing for public services and the distribution of wealth. Or so I guess. But their absence of accountability means that guesswork is all we’ve got. As I showed last month, only one of the rightwing thinktanks I contacted was prepared to reveal who funded it. All the others refused on the grounds that they had to respect the privacy of their donors. These organisations exert great influence in public life. But we have no means of discovering on whose behalf they do it.
Full Story Here: Millionaires and corporations are using tax breaks to help sway public opinion | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian.
The Price of Power: Congressional Leadership Positions for Sale to the Highest Bidder
Uniquely among legislatures in the developed world, our Congressional parties now post prices for key slots on committees. You want it — you buy it.
Under the new rules for the 2008 election cycle, the DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] asked rank-and-file members to contribute $125,000 in dues and to raise an additional $75,000 for the party. Subcommittee chairpersons must contribute $150,000 in dues and raise an additional $100,000. Members who sit on the most powerful committees … must contribute $200,000 and raise an additional $250,000. Subcommittee chairs on power committees and committee chairs of non-power committees must contribute $250,000 and raise $250,000. The five chairs of the power committees must contribute $500,000 and raise an additional $1 million. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Majority Whip James Clyburn, and Democratic Caucus Chair Rahm Emanuel must contribute $800,000 and raise $2.5 million. The four Democrats who serve as part of the extended leadership must contribute $450,000 and raise $500,000, and the nine Chief Deputy Whips must contribute $300,000 and raise $500,000. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi must contribute a staggering $800,000 and raise an additional $25 million.
—Marian Currinder, Money in the House (2008)
THE YEAR IS 1909. The U.S. income distribution is about as lopsided as it is today. J. P. Morgan is fine-tuning a tariff bill by telegraph from his yacht. Morgan and his fellow robber barons have for years reliably tied Congress up in knots whenever anyone proposes regulating trusts, railroad rates, financial speculation, or labor disputes. A notoriously corrupt ring of U.S. senators, the so-called “Millionaires Club,” is on hand to bury in committee any measures that the corporate titans frown upon.
Full Story Here: The Price of Power: Congressional Leadership Positions for Sale to the Highest Bidder | | AlterNet.
Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD’s Homeland Security State
Are drones above New York City next as the police militarize Lower Manhattan?
These last weeks, there have been two “occupations” in lower Manhattan, one of which has been getting almost all the coverage — that of the demonstrators camping out in Zuccotti Park. The other, in the shadows, has been hardly less massive, sustained, or in its own way impressive — the police occupation of the Wall Street area.
On a recent visit to the park, I found the streets around the Stock Exchange barricaded and blocked off to traffic, and police everywhere in every form (in and out of uniform) — on foot, on scooters, on motorcycles, in squad cars with lights flashing, on horses, in paddy wagons or minivans, you name it. At the park’s edge, there is a police observation tower capable of being raised and lowered hydraulically and literally hundreds of police are stationed in the vicinity. I counted more than 50 of them on just one of its sides at a moment when next to nothing was going on — and many more can be seen almost anywhere in the Wall Street area, lolling in doorways, idling in the subway, ambling on the plazas of banks, and chatting in the middle of traffic-less streets.
This might be seen as massive overkill. After all, the New York police have already shelled out an extra $1.9 million, largely in overtime pay at a budget-cutting moment in the city. When, as on Thursday, 100 to 150 marchers suddenly headed out from Zuccotti Park to circle Chase Bank several blocks away, close to the same number of police — some with ominous clumps of flexi-cuffs dangling from their belts — calved off with them. It’s as if the Occupy Wall Street movement has an eternal dark shadow that follows it everywhere.
Full Story Here: Wall Street’s Second Occupation: The Rise of the NYPD’s Homeland Security State | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet.
AIPAC Gives Koch A Pass For Flouting Iran Sanctions
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Koch Industries had been flouting U.S. sanctions with Iran when the company sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to the Islamic Republic over several years. But the powerful pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC — which has for years been one of the most vocal proponents of tougher sanctions on Iran — has given the conservative mega-corporation a pass for dealing with the country.
As Politico’s Ben Smith reports, in a memo AIPAC sent to members of Congress with suggested questions for Obama administration officials, the Israel lobby suggests it is uninterested in holding Koch accountable (the memo presents questions lawmakers could use, so “I” represents the congressman):
Full Story Here: AIPAC Gives Koch A Pass For Flouting Iran Sanctions | ThinkProgress.
Breaking: 30 Citibank customers arrested for closing their account
Was just watching Global Revolution live stream where they were live at a Citibank in LaGuardia watching the police holding 30 customers in a Citibank branch where they were in line to close their bank accounts. There was a large group of protesters outside chanting various rejoinders to the bank officals and the police, who seemed to be their in force. The livestream chat is still buzzing about the arrests and you can see various Citibank numbers passing by to call in protest, especially the Citibank customer relations number.
Full Story Here: Daily Kos: Breaking: 30 Citibank customers arrested for closing their account [With Citibank Statement Update].
this is strange considering the number of people outside with video recorders and this live stream.
Video Here:
Defense Secretary Panetta: Wrong on Military Spending
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is flagrantly advocating for war profiteers at the expense of real security for the American people. He’s trying to browbeat Congress and other officials into continuing to send huge sums of our money to war profiteers who are killing jobs and ripping off the taxpayer. Our new video busts Panetta’s scare tactics and talking points–share it with your friends.
Full Story Here: Defense Secretary Panetta: Wrong on Military Spending – YouTube.
Video: Joel Klein Refuses To Say If There Is A Firewall Between Fox News And News Corp’s New K-12 Education Business
Last year, just as Republicans swept state legislatures across the country and became poised to implement an education privatization agenda, New York City school chancellor Joel Klein announced he was moving to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. As the New York Times reported, his move signaled News Corp.’s aggressive bid to enter the for-profit education business. The company even purchased a digital learning company called Wireless Generation to buttress its K-12 product line.
This worried some education advocates, who are concerned that the conservative politics of News Corp. will bleed into its education services. For instance, News Corp.’s Fox News subsidiary is well known for its revisionist history, smears campaigns against scientists, and ignorance of basic math.
So, at former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s education privatization conference, held today and yesterday in the Palace Hotel in San Francisco, ThinkProgress approached Klein to ask if there are any internal firewalls between the executives at Fox News and News Corp’s education business.
Full Story Here: Video: Joel Klein Refuses To Say If There Is A Firewall Between Fox News And News Corp’s New K-12 Education Business | ThinkProgress.
Justice JP Stevens (Ret.): Bush’s presidency was first step toward fascism
And now comes retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens to assure the nation that what we thought happened in 2000 really did happen: Five justices kowtowed to the obscene request of an over-reaching mob of democracy molesters to hand the presidency of the United States and leadership of the world as we then knew it to the least son of a family that made its fortune supporting Hitler, and acquired its US political currency when the pater familias worked as second-banana to the most banal leader in modern history, Ronald Reagan.
Huffington Post has reported that Stevens wrote, regarding the stay that allowed the execrable Florida recount/revision to take place, “What I still regard as a frivolous stay application kept the court extremely busy for four days.” Stevens also noted that “no justice has ever cited the opinions that provided the basis for their ruling.”
Fascism at its best―by, for and in aid of the most lucrative heist in American history. A government was stolen, the wealth of the nation transferred into the hands of a very few ill-meaning men and women, and the noble experiment once known as the United States of America, and regaled as the first truly workable nominal democracy in history, was flung on the dung-heap of unbridled ambition by those of minimal intellect and even less ability.
Full Story Here: Justice JP Stevens (Ret.) explains it all: Bush’s presidency was first step toward fascism | The Smirking Chimp.
Failed Terror Plot Too Strange To Be True?
Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller held a press conference about a foiled terror plot involving the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Israeli Embassy, a Mexican drug cartel and more. The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down.
Full Story Here: Failed Terror Plot Too Strange To Be True? – YouTube.
Wisconsin Republican Proposes Changing State’s Electoral College Law
A Wisconsin Republican lawmaker is proposing that the state switch its distribution of electoral votes to district-based awards.
State Rep. Dan LeMathieu (R-Sheboygan County) emailed legislators Wednesday morning asking for support for a bill he filed to switch the state from winner-take-all electoral votes to distribution based on presidential candidates winning congressional districts, with only two electoral votes going to the statewide winner. The move follows the introduction of a similar proposal in Pennsylvania.
“This method would better protect the votes in each congressional district,” LeMathieu wrote. “If I live in a congressional district that votes for a candidate that loses the statewide vote this method would allow my district to cast a vote for the candidate the majority of the voters in that district supported. This method would also decrease the incentive for fraud because you would only be affecting the outcome of one congressional district and the two at large votes, instead of all ten votes.”
The Pennsylvania proposal was introduced last month by a Republican state legislator and has won support in the Republican-controlled legislature and from Gov. Tom Corbett (R). Eighteen of the state’s electoral votes would be allocated based on votes in congressional districts and two would be based on statewide votes. An analysis in Mother Jones indicated that a switch in Pennsylvania could tip 12 electoral votes to the Republican presidential nominee with eight going Democratic, if the Democratic nominee captures the statewide popular vote.
Full Story Here: Wisconsin Republican Proposes Changing State’s Electoral College Law.
Police arrest scores of Occupy Boston protesters
Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino today defended the arrests of scores of Occupy Boston protesters in a section of the city’s Greenway park, saying he agrees with them on the issues but they couldn’t be allowed to “tie up the city.”
“I understand they have freedom of speech and freedom of expression, but we have a city to manage,” he said in a telephone interview. “I’m open to suggestions, but civil disobedience will not be tolerated.”
The early morning arrests of the protesters, who have gathered downtown in recent days to criticize the financial industry and social inequality, began at about 1:20 a.m. Police said late this afternoon that 141 people had been arrested.
“The message they are saying … is the middle class of America is having a difficult time. That’s the issue they are trying to get across,” Menino said.
Full Story Here: Boston mayor says he sympathizes with protesters, but they can’t tie up the city – Metro Desk – Local news updates from The Boston Globe.
Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley Could Be Headed Toward Collapse — Will Obama Have the Guts to Do the Right Thing This Time?
If events turn critical again and we face a repeat risk of the seizing up of financial markets as in the fall of 2008, the president will need to make a fateful decision.
Over the past few weeks, President Obama has at last “pivoted,” in the widely used term, from emphasizing deficit reduction to focusing on jobs and taxation of millionaires. Spontaneous protest has done what the organized left failed to do; it has made Wall Street the appropriate target of diffuse economic frustrations. The labor movement has added its weight and institutional skills to these protests, and even President Obama has had some kind words for them.
Fox News and the Republicans have been usefully flummoxed, since it is awfully hard to rise to the defense of the Wall Street banks that caused the financial collapse and to retain credibility with anyone, even the Tea Party base.
But here comes the next phase of the financial crisis, and it will test President Obama’s leadership like nothing else. It will also make or break the faltering credibility of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
Full Story Here: Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley Could Be Headed Toward Collapse — Will Obama Have the Guts to Do the Right Thing This Time? | Economy | AlterNet.
GE CEO Immelt Admits Corporate Tax Holidays Don’t Create Jobs, But Says We Should Have One Anyway
A group of multinational corporations — operating under the banner of a campaign called “WinAmerica” — have been pushing for the enactment of a tax repatriation holiday. Such a holiday would allow companies to bring money they have stashed overseas back to the U.S. at a dramatically lower tax rate, rather than the 35 percent that they would usually pay.
The rationale for a repatriation holiday is that the corporations will use their tax-free dollars to invest in the U.S. and create jobs. But Congress tried a repatriation holiday in 2004, and the companies that benefited the most wound up cutting hundreds of thousands of jobs and moving even more dollars offshore, in anticipation of future holidays.
The failed history of repatriation is well known to General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt, who is the head of President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Immelt said on CBS’ 60 Minutes last night that the 2004 holiday didn’t create jobs. However, he thinks that another repatriation holiday should be enacted anyway:
Full Story Here: GE CEO Immelt Admits Corporate Tax Holidays Don’t Create Jobs, But Says We Should Have One Anyway | ThinkProgress.
The Informants
How the FBI’s Network of Informants Actually Created Most of the Terrorist Plots “Foiled” in the US Since 9/11
The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?
James Cromitie was a man of bluster and bigotry. He made up wild stories about his supposed exploits, like the one about firing gas bombs into police precincts using a flare gun, and he ranted about Jews. “The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion Yahudi,” he once said.
A 45-year-old Walmart stocker who’d adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam during a prison stint for selling cocaine, Cromitie had lots of worries—convincing his wife he wasn’t sleeping around, keeping up with the rent, finding a decent job despite his felony record. But he dreamed of making his mark. He confided as much in a middle-aged Pakistani he knew as Maqsood.
“I’m gonna run into something real big,” he’d say. “I just feel it, I’m telling you. I feel it.”
Full Story Here: The Informants | Mother Jones.
Bank On It: They’re Scared
William Rivers Pitt,:-:
Far be it from me to accuse Gandhi of missing a note, but in the case of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests, the Mahatma’s famous quote appears to be lacking a few essential words. “First they ignore you,” he said, “then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”
That’s not quite correct.
Certainly, the OWS protests began with a great whistling silence from the “mainstream” news media. It is only because of the resources available to the average person in this marvelous technological age we live in that word of the protest ever reached beyond its original location.
Thanks to cell phones, video cameras, digital recorders, and of course, the internet – all wielded by patriot citizens – reports, images and video of the protest began to dribble out via Twitter, Facebook and a variety of blogs and alternative news media sites like Truthout. But from the “mainstream” news, there was nothing, and nothing, and nothing.
Full Story Here: Bank On It: They’re Scared | Truthout.
Name That Socialist! – “I hope we crush the monied corporations!” – YouTube
You have 30 seconds contestants!
Full Story Here: Name That Socialist! – “I hope we crush the monied corporations!” – YouTube.
Ignoring Massive Industry Fraud, Bank Of America CEO Hypes Benefits Of Faster Foreclosures
Speaking at the Atlantic Idea Fest earlier this week, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan sat down for a televised interview with CNBC’s Larry Kudlow. Defending the bank’s new $5 per month debit card fee, Moynihan invented something he called the “right to make a profit.”
But another segment of the interview sheds a great deal of light on how Bank of America sees its role in the economy. A year ago, Bank of America was among the many banks caught in a sweeping “robo-signing” scandal, in which documents were allegedly fabricated in places all over the country in order to foreclose on more homes. Although Bank of America has continued using robo-signing tactics today, Moynihan and Kudlow dismissed the potentially massive fraud, and bantered about how faster foreclosures could be great for the country:
KUDLOW: Isn’t it fair to say the faster the foreclosure, the better off we’re going to be? And I know there’s pain. But of course, some people lose, other people win. Young families come in, they’re going going to get very low prices. But the point is, the faster we clear our the unsold inventory, the sooner this country might start creating jobs in a real economic growth situation. Is that fair?
Full Story Here: Ignoring Massive Industry Fraud, Bank Of America CEO Hypes Benefits Of Faster Foreclosures | ThinkProgress.
Uber-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President
Greg Palast:
The untold story of the sources of the loot controlled by Paul “The Vulture” Singer, Ken Langone and the Kochs – and why they need to buy the White House.
Hedge fund magnate Paul Singer likes to breakfast on decayed carcasses. What he chews down is sickening, but just as nausea-inducing are his new tablemates: billionaires Ken Langone and the Koch Brothers, Charles and David.
Singer has called together the billionaire boys’ club for the purpose of picking our next president for us. The old-fashioned way of choosing presidents – democracy and counting ballots and all that – has never been a favorite of this pack. I can tell you that from my investigations of each of these gentlemen for The Guardian. When the Statue of Liberty has nightmares, she dreams that these guys will combine to seize America via a cash-and-carry coup d’état.
Full Story Here: Uber-Vultures: The Billionaires Who Would Pick Our President | Truthout.
A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America
Author and public intellectual Colin Greer tells us how we got where we are today. It’s not a pretty picture, but hope is on the way.
At this moment, there are growing protests on Wall Street in Manhattan, in Boston at the Bank of America, and in cities around the country. These embryonic and creative efforts are targeting the greed of the banks, the collusion of the corporate class with their corrupt elected officials, the high level of unemployment, the huge burden of student loans in a time of diminished opportunities, the increasing numbers of poor and hungry people, and much more. These protests, along with those earlier in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, are signs of revival of a long tradition of popular revolt against excesses of wealth and the corporate class.
Full Story Here: The Big Picture: A 40-Year Scan of the Right-Wing Corporate Takeover of America | | AlterNet.
Putting Pundits to Shame: Protesters Know Exactly What They’re Fighting For
Their style may not have been as mainstream as the retirees attending a Glenn Beck rally, but they knew precisely what they were there for.
It should come as a surprise to nobody that the corporate media’s early coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement has featured an abundance of hippie-punching but very little about the substantive issues driving thousands of Americans to take over the streets of cities across the country.
As I approached the 30 or so activists who have been camped out for weeks in front of the Federal Reserve Building as part of OccupySF – a protest smaller than those in New York, Boston or Los Angeles – I’d been primed by news stories heaping scorn on these ostensibly confused, foul-smelling rebels-without-a-cause, but what I encountered was very different.
I discovered that while their style may not have been as mainstream as that of the retirees attending a Glenn Beck rally, they knew precisely what they were there for. They had specific demands and even a simple-to-understand “bumper-sticker” message. “We stand for the 99 percent who don’t have much of a voice in this system,” a young woman named Melissa told me. A recent graduate with “not much in the way of job prospects,” she said she’d never been involved in a protest before.
Full Story Here: Putting Pundits to Shame: Protesters Know Exactly What They’re Fighting For | Activism & Vision | AlterNet.
The Real Reason Why Police Cage Peaceful Protestors
With Occupy Wall Street protesters kettled on the Brooklyn Bridge this weekend, we look at how kettling was used on protesters during the London riots earlier this year.
On Saturday, the Occupy Wall St. movement marched on the Brooklyn bridge in New York. Police officers cut the demonstrators off from the exits, entrapping them on the bridge, in the rain, before carting off as many as 700 to jail. In the story below, British journalist Dan Hancox writes about how corralling peaceful protestors, or “kettling,” was used by Britain’s conservative government to steamroll resistance to their drastic austerity agenda. As the Occupy Wall St. movement spreads to cities all over America, we may see much more of this type of policing of public space to quell protests.
Across the western world, the public is losing a battle for territory. In the UK, publically owned health care, housing, welfare and education are being cut, broken up and sold off for private profit by David Cameron’s Conservative government with audacious speed. This has a very physical manifestation– in the suffocating of peaceful protest through a technique that has become known as “kettling,” in which protestors are contained for five, seven or 10 hours without food, water, toilets, or hope of release.
Kettling has become synonymous with the enforcement of the Conservative government’s radical austerity and privatization program. In November and December 2010 a student uprising in Britain larger than that of May 1968 saw over 40,000 students take to the streets of London on four separate occasions to protest against the government. They occupied countless university buildings during this period, and linked up with the anti-cuts movement UK Uncut (which I’ve written about for AlterNet).
Full Story Here: The Real Reason Why Police Cage Peaceful Protestors | Activism & Vision | AlterNet.
Occupy Wall Street ends capitalism’s alibi
| Richard Wolff |
This protest pinpoints how dysfunctional our economic system is: we must refashion it for human needs, not corporate aims
Occupy Wall Street has already weathered the usual early storms. The kept media ignored the protest, but that failed to end it. The partisans of inequality mocked it, but that failed to end it. The police servants of the status quo over-reacted and that failed to end it – indeed, it fueled the fire. And millions looking on said, “Wow!” And now, ever more people are organising local, parallel demonstrations – from Boston to San Francisco and many places between.
Let me urge the occupiers to ignore the usual carping that besets powerful social movements in their earliest phases. Yes, you could be better organised, your demands more focused, your priorities clearer. All true, but in this moment, mostly irrelevant. Here is the key: if we want a mass and deep-rooted social movement of the left to re-emerge and transform the United States, we must welcome the many different streams, needs, desires, goals, energies and enthusiasms that inspire and sustain social movements. Now is the time to invite, welcome and gather them, in all their profusion and confusion.
Full Story Here: Occupy Wall Street ends capitalism’s alibi | Richard Wolff | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.
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If we don't change our ways soon...
A new report by the Royal Society, chaired by Nobel prize-winning biologist Sir John Sulston warns that world population must be stabilized and consumption in wealthy nations must be reduced or the entire planet is in big trouble. As the report reads: "The number of people living on the planet has never been higher, their levels of consumption are unprecedented and vast changes are taking place in the environment. We can choose to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption... or we can choose to do nothing and to drift into a downward spiral of economic and environmental ills leading to a more unequal and inhospitable future."This is the same warning that President Jimmy Carter gave Americans back in the 1970's - but it was ignored when Ronald Reagan came to power with a "more positive" message basically telling Americans we can do whatever we want. And then after 9/11 - Bush told us all we should go shopping and consume ever more.And now with corporations calling the shots in Washington - long-term sustainability of the planet takes a back seat to short-term profits. If we don't change our ways soon - and embrace clean, alternative energy and educate women around the plant - then we all could be headed for a rough century.-Thom(Is there any chance we will learn in time? Tell us here.) -
LEGALIZE Democracy
" We the corporations" On January 21, 2010, with its ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are persons, entitled by the U.S. Constitution to buy elections and run our government. __________
MOVE to AMEND
a project of the CAMPAIGN TO LEGALIZE Democracy
Help end Corporate personhood
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The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. 
moveon.org
