Citizen G'kar: Musings on Earth

February 23, 2011

Far right's vision would have an America with a tiny elite corporate community and the wealthy ruling a vast working class with no social services

MADISON, WI - FEBRUARY 22: Protestors demonstr...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife
Keith Ellison, one of my heroes these days, speaks the unadulterated truth. Surprising to see this from any politician in public.

Ellison said Gov. Scott Walker, who says the collective bargaining changes must be made to help resolve the state's budget deficit, is showing signs usually associated with a dictator: "He won't negotiate; that's not the spirit of a public servant. He's being extreme, radical and reckless, and he's going to fail."
The conference call was arranged by the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, which works to elect progressive candidates.
Adam Green, the group's co-founder, said the Wisconsin battle has become a "proxy for what Americans are feeling nationally, massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, followed by cuts to the middle class."
He said rallies will be held Saturday, at noon local time, in all 50 state Capitols, to support the Wisconsin state workers.
Ellison said that the far right's vision — which Walker is pushing in Wisconsin — would have an America with a tiny elite corporate community and the wealthy ruling a vast working class, with no social services. He said it would be similar to Nigeria or Pakistan.

February 10, 2011

Wael Ghonim vs. Barack Obama: Change we Can Believe in, Yes we Can

Juan Cole eviscerates Obama comparing him dis-favorably to the hero of the Egyptian revolution. Follow the link and read. Open your eyes to the fact that the US is no longer the beacon of freedom. I'm beginning to think that nothing short of bringing it to the streets in the US will make a difference.

It is no secret that President Barack Obama has been in some regards a profound disappointment to the American Left, and his erratic and often disgraceful performance on the Egypt crisis exemplifies his faults in this regard. (Tom Engelhardt puts it best regarding the administration: “It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events.”) Obama just seems to lack empathy with the little people and is unwilling to buck the rich and powerful, even though they all opposed his run for the presidency.

February 06, 2011

Muslim Brotherhood Join Egypt Talks as Hamas Begins to Shake

Egyptian Intelligence Director Omar Suleiman a...

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I never thought I'd see this day.

Members of the Muslim Brotherhood joined other opposition groups meeting with Vice President Omar Suleiman on Sunday in what seemed a significant departure in the nation’s uprising and political history.
The Brotherhood is an outlawed Islamist organization often depicted by the authorities as committed to the overthrow of the secular order in the heart of the Middle East. Official attitudes toward it here have swung between outright repression and reluctant tolerance. But it has remained Egypt’s biggest opposition force against the autocratic rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
After the meeting had started, The Associated Press said that talks included some of the top issues for the opposition — including freedom of the press and the release of those detained since anti-government protests started — as well as agreement to begin setting up a structure to study amending the country’s constitution.
A spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Gamal Nassar, said the huge and sometimes violent demonstrations that have paralyzed Cairo for 13 days, reverberating around the Middle East, would continue “until the political path can have a role in achieving the aspirations of the protesters” — an apparent reference to their goal of removing Mr. Mubarak.
Mr. Nassar said mediators had brokered the encounter with Mr. Suleiman, who Saturday received public backing from the Obama administration and other Western governments that confirmed him as the West’s choice to guide any transfer of power.
“The brothers decided to enter a round of dialogue to determine how serious the officials are achieving the demands of the people,” Mr. Nassar said. “The regime keeps saying we’re open to dialogue and the people are the ones refusing, so the Brotherhood decided to examine the situation from all different sides.”

So do you suppose Israel will talk to Hamas? er... Maybe Hamas is in trouble now.

Ripple effects of the Egyptian uprising are now spreading to Gaza, where some groups are planning a new rally next week. Moves by some Gazans to mimic protesters in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen by taking to the streets are making the Hamas government nervous.
Government officials sponsored an official rally in solidarity with the Egyptian protesters earlier, but when a small group of journalists and bloggers organized their own, six women and eight men were arrested. Two of the women, known for their outspoken criticism of the regime, were beaten up.

And with Al Jazeera, bombed by US plans in Iraq, banned at various times by the Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egyptian, Palestinian Authority, I suspect they may be the future of journalism and one of the few places you can get news without the spin of the plutocracy.

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood has cast doubt on the government's willingness to follow through on promised reforms, following talks with authorities aimed at ending the country's political crisis.
One of the group's leaders told Al Jazeera that the Muslim Brotherhood does not trust the government to make its proposed changes - a development that came as pro-democracy rallies continued across the country on Sunday - the 13th day of protests in Egypt.
Tens of thousands of protesters observed a "day of the martyrs" in Cairo's Tahrir Square - the focal point of the protests - calling for an end to Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.
Al Jazeera correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, who was at the square, was arrested by the military on Sunday afternoon, prompting calls from the channel and international media-rights groups for his release. He was released nine hours later.
The army fired tracer rounds into the air at a cordon they had set up near the Egyptian Museum, an Al Jazeera correspondent in the square reported late on Sunday evening. An army tank also moved towards the 6th of October bridge, where protesters often gather, he said.
Both Muslims and Christians held prayers at the square for the victims of the uprising.

The world has changed a lot in the past couple weeks. Muslims were killing Coptic Christians a couple weeks ago.

January 27, 2011

Prominent Rabbis to Place Ad Against Beck, Ailes, in Murdoch-Owned WSJ

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From Alternet comes signs that the Jewish community is tiring of the bigotry at Fox. I'd say they are about a year or two too late.

A group of hundreds of rabbis, from all the major denominations of religious Judaism, have had enough of the constant cry of "Nazis" from creepy Glenn Beck, whose recent programs have veered dangerously close to Anti-Semitism. Recently, he made particularly disgusting comments about George Soros, who survived the Holocaust as a child by hiding with a non-Jewish family. They're also none too pleased with Fox News chief Roger Ailes for his dismissive dig at "left-wing rabbis" who objected to Beck.

So they're going straight to the boss, Rupert Murdoch, by placing a massive full-page ad criticizing Beck's words in the Murdoch-owned WSJ. The ad will run on Thursday, which is Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The ad, signed by prominent members of the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements, will also run in the Jewish Daily Forward newspaper.

"We share a belief that the Holocaust, of course, can and should be discussed appropriately in the media. But that is not what we have seen at Fox News,"

"... It is not appropriate to accuse a 14-year-old Jew hiding with a Christian family in Nazi-occupied Hungary of sending his people to death camps...It is not appropriate to call executives of another news agency 'Nazis.' And it is not appropriate to make literally hundreds of on-air references to the Holocaust and Nazis when characterizing people with whom you disagree."

"...We respectfully request that Glenn Beck be sanctioned by Fox News for his completely unacceptable attacks on a survivor of the Holocaust and that Roger Ailes apologize for his dismissive remarks about rabbis' sensitivity to how the Holocaust is used on the air."

January 16, 2011

Shields on Obama's Tucson Speech, Calls for Political Civility

Allen Ginsberg was an eyewitness to the riots

Image via WikipediaOnly a few times have I seen TV news programs provide something truly inspirational. Mark Shields on PBS News Hour did that Friday.

There was one observation that was made this week I just have to pass on to you by a friend of mine, Allen Ginsberg, who is an historian up in Maine. And he said, this week, we saw a white, Catholic, Republican federal judge murdered on his way to greet a Democratic woman, member of Congress, who was his friend and was Jewish. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year-old Mexican-American college student, who saved her, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon.

January 14, 2011

The Shameful Attack on Public Employees

The corner of Wall Street and Broadway, showin...

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Class warfare has been an expertise of the Republican Party for a long time. Since the 60s, Republicans have singled out African Americans with vote suppression, by requiring photo IDs of all voters knowing that large numbers of blacks born in the rural south have no birth certificate so can't get an ID.
Then Ronald Reagan singled out poor mothers as the "unworthy poor".

Drug laws have been tailored to focus on the minority communities which disproportionately use the cheaper crack, not the suburban power cocaine user.

Now the attack is on public employees, disproportionately women and minority in large urban centers.

Public servants are convenient scapegoats. Republicans would rather deflect attention from corporate executive pay that continues to rise as corporate profits soar, even as corporations refuse to hire more workers. They don’t want stories about Wall Street bonuses, now higher than before taxpayers bailed out the Street. And they’d like to avoid a spotlight on the billions raked in by hedge-fund and private-equity managers whose income is treated as capital gains and subject to only a 15 percent tax, due to a loophole in the tax laws designed specifically for them.

It’s far more convenient to go after people who are doing the public’s work - sanitation workers, police officers, fire fighters, teachers, social workers, federal employees – to call them “faceless bureaucrats” and portray them as hooligans who are making off with your money and crippling federal and state budgets. The story fits better with the Republican’s Big Lie that our problems are due to a government that’s too big.

Above all, Republicans don’t want to have to justify continued tax cuts for the rich. As quietly as possible, they want to make them permanent.

But the right’s argument is shot-through with bad data, twisted evidence, and unsupported assertions.

They say public employees earn far more than private-sector workers. That’s untrue when you take account of level of education. Matched by education, public sector workers actually earn less than their private-sector counterparts.

...It’s only average workers – both in the public and the private sectors – who are being called upon to sacrifice.

This is what the current Republican attack on public-sector workers is really all about. Their version of class warfare is to pit private-sector workers against public servants. They’d rather set average working people against one another – comparing one group’s modest incomes and benefits with another group’s modest incomes and benefits – than have Americans see that the top 1 percent is now raking in a bigger share of national income than at any time since 1928, and paying at a lower tax rate. And Republicans would rather you didn’t know they want to cut taxes on the rich even more.

December 17, 2010

Wall Street Whitewash

Official photo of Congressman Spencer Bachus (...

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When the truth doesn't fit ideology, change the "truth". The GOP is counting on the voters to forget what really happened with the housing bubble.

When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.

How naïve we were. We should have realized that the modern Republican Party is utterly dedicated to the Reaganite slogan that government is always the problem, never the solution. And, therefore, we should have realized that party loyalists, confronted with facts that don’t fit the slogan, would adjust the facts.

... It’s not as if the story of the crisis is particularly obscure. First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.

Then the bubble burst, with hugely disruptive consequences. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood, so that the failure of Lehman Brothers, a medium-size investment bank, could threaten to take down the whole world financial system.

It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally.

... In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble.

It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, the housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia. Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble.

Beyond that, the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.

But the G.O.P. commissioners are just doing their job, which is to sustain the conservative narrative. And a narrative that absolves the banks of any wrongdoing, that places all the blame on meddling politicians, is especially important now that Republicans are about to take over the House.

Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”...

December 12, 2010

Multi-national Companies Rely on US Decline To Create Profit

The free trade movement was another scam of the plutocracy designed to depress wages in the US and create profit in other low wage countries.

Image via WikipediaFree trade doesn't work, the global economy is a myth and the U.S. has been duped during trade negotiations for the past 40 years according to Ian Fletcher, an adjunct fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council and author of Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace It and Why, who relayed these concepts to me in an exclusive interview.

During our exchange I discovered that Mr. Fletcher certainly is not opposed to capitalism, underlined by his experience working for hedge funds and private equity firms as an economist, but what he is opposed to are bad economic policies that have led to an ever-burgeoning U.S. trade deficit well on its way to hitting $500 billion this year.

"Since the late 1990s, one can trace public opinion and congressional majorities inexorably turning against "free" trade, which has really been a distinctive, offshoring-focused approach to trade policy to benefit multinational corporate interests. Why has it taken so long? Corruption, both the obvious kind driven by campaign finance, and the subtler kind deriving from the laziness, complacency, and intellectual arrogance of economists.

The "American" multinationals, which are no longer American corporations but find this fiction convenient on Capitol Hill, and other free trade advocates have prevailed because a critical mass of American voters has not yet seen through the delusional economics of free trade, and because America can still borrow money abroad and sell off assets to cover its trade deficit. But this music is going to stop fairly soon.

"... the American elite is quite happy to let America gradually decline so long as they can make investments and money overseas."

Something is Rotten: Interpol's Red Alert on Assange

Julian Assange at New Media Days 09 in Copenhagen.

Image via WikipediaI'd say, something IS rotten in Sweden and Britain.

Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something is rotten in Sweden.”

As I wrote earlier in this publication, the alleged sexual crimes that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:

1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,

2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later, allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test. (Assange says he had turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but not justification for a rape charge!)

In most countries, including the US and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest. (The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)

You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two suspects--Wallenkurtz and Assange--are brought to Interpol.

You also have to wonder how it is that Assange--charged only with consensual sex “offenses”--is denied bail by a British court magistrate, despite having several people at his arraignment hearing, including a well-known British filmmaker, ready to post whatever bail might be required to assure his return to court for an extradition hearing, while even people charged with aggressive rape are apparently routinely released on bail in both the UK and Sweden.

Here’s an interesting letter that ran yesterday in the Guardian in England, authored by Katrin Axelsson, of the British organization Women Against Rape:

“Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased. On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported". They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.  ..."

December 03, 2010

This Economy's Winners and Losers

"There is a war going on in this country...a war being waged by some of the wealthiest & most powerful people in this country against the working families of the United Sates of America, against the disappearing middle class." - Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont

December 02, 2010

The New American Oligarchy

Citizens registered as an Independent, Democra...

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There is a war underway. I'm not talking about Washington’s bloody misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq, but a war within our own borders. It’s a war fought on the airwaves, on television and radio and over the Internet, a war of words and images, of half-truth, innuendo, and raging lies. I'm talking about a political war, pitting liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans. I'm talking about a spending war, fueled by stealthy front groups and deep-pocketed anonymous donors. It’s a war that's poised to topple what's left of American democracy.

...It used to be that citizens in large numbers, mobilized by labor unions or political parties or a single uniting cause, determined the course of American politics. After World War II, a swelling middle class was the most powerful voting bloc, while, in those same decades, the working and middle classes enjoyed comparatively greater economic prosperity than their wealthy counterparts. Kiss all that goodbye. We're now a country run by rich people.

Not surprisingly, political power has a way of following wealth. What that means is: you can't understand how the rich seized control of American politics, and arguably American society, without understanding how a small group of Americans got so much money in the first place.

That story begins in the late 1970s and continues through the Obama years, a period in which American policy has been so skewed toward the rich that we're now living through the worst period of income inequality in modern history. Consider the statistics: 50 years ago, the wealthiest 1% of Americans accounted for one of every 10 dollars of the nation's income; today, it's nearly one in every four. Between 1979 and 2006, the average post-tax household income (including benefits) of the wealthiest 1% increased by 256%; the poorest households saw an increase of 11%; middle class homes, 21%, much of which was due to the arrival of two-job families.

Gitmo Inmates Subjected to Medical Experimentation/Torture

WASHINGTON - JANUARY 11: Members of Witness A...

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It's getting so that you can't tell the good guys from the bad guys. Sounds like Dr. Josef Mengele would consider these US Army physicians as colleagues.

The Defense Department forced all "war on terror" detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison to take a high dosage of a controversial antimalarial drug, mefloquine, an act that an Army public health physician called "pharmacologic waterboarding."

The US military administered the drug despite Pentagon knowledge that mefloquine caused severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including suicidal thoughts, hallucinations and anxiety. The drug was used on the prisoners whether they had malaria or not.

The revelation, which has not been previously reported, was buried in documents publicly released by the Defense Department (DoD) two years ago as part of the government's investigation into the June 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees.

... All detainees arriving at Guantanamo in January 2002 were first given a treatment dosage of 1,250 mg of mefloquine, before laboratory tests were conducted to determine if they actually had the disease, according to a section of the DoD documents entitled "Standard Inprocessing Orders For Detainees." The 1,250 mg dosage is what would be given if the detainees actually had malaria. That dosage is five times higher than the prophylactic dose given to individauls to prevent the disease.

Maj. Remington Nevin, an Army public health physician, who formerly worked at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center and has written extensively about mefloquine, said in an interview the use of mefloquine "in this manner ... is, at best, an egregious malpractice."

The government has exposed detainees "to unacceptably high risks of potentially severe neuropsychiatric side effects, including seizures, intense vertigo, hallucinations, paranoid delusions, aggression, panic, anxiety, severe insomnia, and thoughts of suicide," said Nevin, who was not speaking in an official capacity, but offering opinions as a board-certified, preventive medicine physician. "These side effects could be as severe as those intended through the application of 'enhanced interrogation techniques.'"

November 23, 2010

FBI Wiretapping of Internet Users. "All Your Data Belongs to Us"

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I, photog...

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Privacy on the internet no longer exists. Homeland Security are channeling J Edgar Hoover's privacy invasion tactics in a new round of Obama inspired intrusions and extensions of Bush's "War Powers". Still supposedly it is to track international terror, however the focus is now on US citizens.

by Tom Burghardt, GlobalResearch.ca

Never mind that the FBI, as Wired Magazine revealed three years ago, "has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device."

Security journalist Ryan Singel reported that the Bureau's Digital Collection System Network or DCS-3000, a newer iteration of the Carnivore system of the 1990s, "connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies."

Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit revealed that the system was created to "intercept personal communications services delivered via emerging digital technologies used by wireless carriers." A second system, Red Hook, collects "voice and data calls and then process and display the intercepted information."

...

While Microsoft doesn't charge the government for spying on their users, conveniently doing away with a messy paper trail in the process, Google receives $25 and Yahoo $29 from taxpayers for the privilege of being surveilled. Soghoian points out that "Google and Yahoo! may make more money from surveillance than they get directly from their email users. Basic Google and Yahoo! email accounts are free. Department of Justice documents show that telcos may charge as much as $2,000 for a pen register."

That 2006 report from the DoJ's Office of the Inspector General reported that to facilitate CALEA compliance, "Congress appropriated $500 million to reimburse carriers for the direct costs of modifying systems installed or deployed on or before January 1, 1995."

...

The bill, the Homeland Security Cyber and Physical Infrastructure Protection Act (HSCPIPA), has "other high-profile backers," including Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) and Yvette Clarke (D-NY), the outgoing chair of the Cybersecurity Subcommittee.

Last week, Antifascist Calling reported that Clarke proclaimed that "the likelihood of a cyberattack that could bring down our [electrical] grid is ... 100%. Our networks are already being penetrated as we stand here. We are already under attack."

Clarke, who raised some $267,938 in campaign contributions during the current election cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org, including tens of thousands of dollars from defense and security grifters such as Honeywell International, Dell, AT&T, Raytheon, Verizon, Boeing and General Dynamics, not to mention that sterling citizen and beacon of financial transparency, Goldman Sachs.

With a straight face, she asserted: "We must stop asking ourselves 'could this happen to us' and move to a default posture that acknowledges this fact and instead asks 'what can we do to protect ourselves'?"

With the introduction of HSCPIPA, we now have our answer!

Hardly slouches themselves when it comes to feeding at the corporate security trough, Harman raked in $654,787 from firms such as Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), while Thompson grabbed$584,938 from firms like SAIC, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, all of whom do yeoman's work, as readers are well aware, to "keep us safe."

While no Republicans have signed onto the bill, the incoming chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, ultra-rightist crazy, Rep. Peter King (R-NY), pulled down some $664,657 from his loyal constituents: General Dynamics, Goldman Sachs, AT&T, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, OpenSecrets told us.

...

As the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out last week in their denunciation of the FBI's sought-after legislation, "this proposal isn't simply applying the same sort of wiretap system we have for phones to the Internet; it would require reconfiguring and changing the nature of the Internet."

Laura W. Murphy, the Director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office said they "remain very concerned that this proposal is a clear recipe for abuse and will make it that much easier for the government to gain access to our most personal information."

"Americans," Murphy averred, "should not simply surrender their privacy and other fundamental values in the name of national security."

November 11, 2010

Bill Moyers: "Welcome to the Plutocracy!"

There have been few journalists since Walter Cronkite that have had the credibility and moral high ground he enjoyed. There is one journalist that does, though he's been religated to PBS and has now twice retired. Bill Moyers is a man who everyone needs to hear. Excerpts of his speech at Boston University follow, and then the complete video.

...No, it’s “wage repression,” and it’s been happening in our country since around 1980. I must invoke some statistics here, knowing that statistics can glaze the eyes; but if indeed it’s the mark of a truly educated person to be deeply moved by statistics, as I once read, surely this truly educated audience will be moved by the recent analysis of tax data by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. They found that from 1950 through 1980, the share of all income in America going to everyone but the rich increased from 64 percent to 65 percent. Because the nation’s economy was growing handsomely, the average income for 9 out of l0 Americans was growing, too – from $17,719 to $30,941. That’s a 75 percent increase in income in constant 2008 dollars.
But then it stopped. Since 1980 the economy has also continued to grow handsomely, but only a fraction at the top have benefitted. The line flattens for the bottom 90% of Americans. Average income went from that $30,941 in 1980 to $31,244 in 2008. Think about that: the average income of Americans increased just $303 dollars in 28 years.
That’s wage repression.
...I doubt you’ll be surprised to learn that this “degenerate and unlovely age” – as one historian described it – served to inspire Karl Rove, the man said to be George W. Bush’s brain and now a mover and shaker of the money tree for the corporate-conservative complex (more on that later.) The extraordinary coupling of private and political power toward the close of the 19th century – the First Gilded Age – captured Rove’s interest, especially the role of Mark Hanna, the Ohio operative who became the first modern political fund-raiser.
...Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan also tried to warn us. He said President Reagan’s real strategy was to force the government to cut domestic social programs by fostering federal deficits of historic dimensions.

October 23, 2010

Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'

Depleted uranium munitions that were atomized when exploded, have been breathed by the inhabitants of Fallujah since 2004. Other 'secret' munitions forbidden by international law also were used. Freedom of the press and information in general has been assumed in the US for a long time. But recent history makes it clear, we are given only a selected part of the news that supports a US centric perspective. Thus 'secrets' like the condition of the people of Fallujah never sees mainstreet news in the US. Hat tip to Truth Out for the link.

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

...Researchers found a 38-fold increase in leukaemia, a ten-fold increase in female breast cancer and significant increases in lymphoma and brain tumours in adults. At Hiroshima survivors showed a 17-fold increase in leukaemia, but in Fallujah Dr Busby says what is striking is not only the greater prevalence of cancer but the speed with which it was affecting people.

Of particular significance was the finding that the sex ratio between newborn boys and girls had changed. In a normal population this is 1,050 boys born to 1,000 girls, but for those born from 2005 there was an 18 per cent drop in male births, so the ratio was 850 males to 1,000 females. The sex-ratio is an indicator of genetic damage that affects boys more than girls. A similar change in the sex-ratio was discovered after Hiroshima.

October 21, 2010

The Perfect Storm

Free enterprise is all but a goner in the US today. Our country is on the verge of becoming a plutocracy, government by Fat Cats, the Robber Barons that were stamped down before WWI, who virtually enslaved workers. They're baaaak!

It’s a perfect storm. And I’m not talking about the impending dangers facing Democrats. I’m talking about the dangers facing our democracy.

First, income in America is now more concentrated in fewer hands than it’s been in 80 years. Almost a quarter of total income generated in the United States is going to the top 1 percent of Americans.

The top one-tenth of one percent of Americans now earn as much as the bottom 120 million of us. Who are these people? With the exception of a few entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, they’re top executives of big corporations and Wall Street, hedge-fund managers, and private equity managers. They include the Koch brothers, whose wealth increased by billions last year, and who are now funding tea party candidates across the nation.

Which gets us to the second part of the perfect storm. A relatively few Americans are buying our democracy as never before. And they’re doing it completely in secret.
Hundreds of millions of dollars are pouring into advertisements for and against candidates — without a trace of where the dollars are coming from. They’re laundered through a handful of groups. Fred Maleck, whom you may remember as deputy director of Richard Nixon’s notorious Committee to Reelect the President (dubbed Creep in the Watergate scandal), is running one of them. Republican operative Karl Rove runs another. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a third.

October 20, 2010

NAACP releases report accusing tea party groups of links to bigots

Image via WikipediaThis of course isn't news to anyone who has been paying close attention to the Tea Party movement. But, here it is in.. er.. black and white...

Three months ago in Kansas City, the NAACP first raised charges of racism within the tea party movement. Today a report is being released accusing tea party groups of providing platforms to anti-Semites and other bigots.

“These groups and individuals are out there, and we ignore them at our own peril,” said NAACP President Benjamin Todd Jealous in a statement announcing the report. “They are speaking at tea party events, recruiting at rallies, and in some cases remain in the tea party leadership itself.”

...The new report describes what it calls links between tea party factions and white supremacist groups, anti-immigrant organizations and militias, according to a news release issued by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, which wrote the document.
Not only have tea parties given platforms to extremists, the news release said, the movement is a recruiting ground for hard-core white nationalists who are “hoping to push these (white) protesters toward a more self-conscious and ideological white supremacy.”
The report, “Tea Party Nationalism: A Critical Examination of the Tea Party Movement and the Size, Scope, and Focus of Its National Factions,” was written by Leonard Zeskind and Devin Burghart of the Kansas City-based Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights.
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