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The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Washington Times - The 'Orwellian' Bush administration - 0 views

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    About the Bush administration's attack on separation of powers
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Preservationists in Chicago Fear Losing Ground to Condos - New York Times - 0 views

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    Watch what's left of a once distinguished architectural legacy be destroyed because our city is run by idiots. Consider this quote: ""Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," Alderman Matlak said. "A lot of people don't want 19th-century buildings.I grew up in a frame house. My bedroom was 8 by 8. People don't want that now." Then - here's a wild idea. Maybe they might try moving into one of the neighborhoods that isn't historic? Which, in Chicago, is almost all of them, now? Speaking as somebody who lives in Chicago, I can report that the difference of opinion between the developers and the preservationists on this is not an honest one; the rate of demolition has not been exaggerated one bit.
The Ravine / Joseph Dunphy

Censorship on Campus? Time to Privatize America's Universities by Onkar Ghate -- Capita... - 0 views

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    So bad it's worth reading, because you're going to see this argument, again, I'm sure. The author argues that universities are, themselves, victims of censorship if they are not free to fire faculty members for expressing political viewpoints which they don't like, because they are being forced to support views they don't like. This is question begging, because it presupposes that by allowing them to stay on its payrolls, a university has allowed those faculty members to speak for it; that the very act of allowing them to stay signals support for their views. This is nonsense. They are paid to teach. Their political views are their own business. Making the point, quite unintentionally I would guess, that the last thing Libertarianism promotes is individual liberty. If you're not free to speak your views openly without fear of destitution, then just how free is speech, really?
Bakari Chavanu

bonuses-put-goldman-in-public-relations-bind: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance - 0 views

  • But these days that old dictum is being truncated to just “greedy” by some Goldman critics. While many ordinary Americans are still waiting for an economic recovery, Goldman and its employees are enjoying one of the richest periods in the bank’s 140-year history.
  • For Goldman employees, it is almost as if the financial crisis never happened. Only months after paying back billions of taxpayer dollars, Goldman Sachs is on pace to pay annual bonuses that will rival the record payouts that it made in 2007, at the height of the bubble. In the last nine months, the bank set aside about $16.7 billion for compensation — on track to pay each of its 31,700 employees close to $700,000 this year. Top producers are expecting multimillion-dollar paydays.
  • But its strong financial showing — a profit of $3.19 billion in the third quarter — was overshadowed by Goldman’s swelling bonus pool. Goldman set aside nearly half of its revenue to reward its employees, a common practice on Wall Street, even in this post-bailout era.
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  • Even in 2008, the most tumultuous year in modern Wall Street history, Goldman employees reaped rewards that most people can only dream about. Goldman paid out $4.82 billion in bonuses last year, awarding 953 employees at least $1 million each and 78 executives $5 million or more. The rewards for 2009 will be far greater.
  • “We are very focused on what is going on in the world,” Mr. Viniar replied to a barrage of questions about whether the bank should pay outsize bonuses in these hard economic times. “We are focused on the economic climate. We are focused on what is going on with other people.”
Peter Neis

Election Canada-Third Time Lucky - 0 views

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    Liberals v.s the Conservative Tea Party of Canada....as Harper tries to defend why he broke the law and received the contempt of Parliament. A disgraceful man who runs a dictatorship that destroys democracy.
thinkahol *

Can the Fed Prevent the Next Crisis by Eliminating Interest on Student Loan Debt? | Tru... - 0 views

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    Among the demands of the Wall Street protesters is student debt forgiveness - a debt "jubilee." Occupy Philly has a "Student Loan Jubilee Working Group," and other groups are studying the issue. Commentators say debt forgiveness is impossible. Who would foot the bill? But there is one deep pocket that could pull it off - the Federal Reserve. In its first quantitative easing program (QE1), the Fed removed $1.3 trillion in toxic assets from the books of Wall Street banks. For QE4, it could remove $1 trillion in toxic debt from the backs of millions of students.
Bakari Chavanu

The root cause of war is oligarchic capitalism | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • After World War Two, Britain and the USA pressured the United Nations into confiscating Arab land to form the state of Israel, making the Arabs pay for the crimes of the Germans. In addition to providing a nation for the Jews, Israel would be a forward base for Western economic and military power in the Middle East. To the Arabs it was another European invasion of their territory.
  • In the early 1950s, the USA and Britain overthrew the government of Iran because it tried to nationalise its oil industry, which was under Western control.
  • In the mid-1950s, Egypt decided to nationalise the Suez Canal and use the income from it to help their people out of poverty. They were willing to pay its British and French owners the full market value for their shares, but Western governments and Israel responded violently, invading and bombing Egypt into submission.
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  • The USA and Britain committed similar atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Indonesia and Afghanistan. We overthrew their governments, installed dictators, undermined their economies - all to strengthen our business interests. In every nation where we now have terrorism, we had first assaulted them.
  • Capitalism is always at war. The violence, though, is often abstract: forcing us either to accept low-paying, exhausting jobs or starve; denying us adequate healthcare, education and economic security; convincing us that human beings are basically isolated, autonomous units seeking self gratification. But when this doesn't suffice to keep their profits growing, the violence becomes physical, the cannons roar, and the elite rallies us to war to defend "our" country and destroy the fiendish enemy.
  • Since 9/11 the USA has killed over 300,000 - a hundred times more than died in the World Trade Center. The overwhelming majority have been civilians.
  • As Martin Luther King stated with simple eloquence: "The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government."
  • Since they don't have our military power, they resort to guerrilla warfare. As Mike Davis wrote, "The car bomb is the poor man's air force."
  • www.amazon.com/dp/1897455844
Bakari Chavanu

Bernie Sanders Flirted With 100% Marginal Tax on the Rich, Maximum Wage - Bloomberg Pol... - 0 views

  • “No. That's not 90 percent of your income, you know? That's the marginal.”
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      Marginal tax is simply the amount of tax paid on an additional dollar of income. As income rises, so does the tax rate. This is different than a flat tax rate where you pay the same rate of tax no matter what your income level is.
  • Sanders is described as wanting to “make it illegal to amass more wealth than a human family could use in a lifetime.” He would do that, the article said, with “a 100 percent tax on incomes above this level ($ one million per year)” and “would recycle this money for the public need.”
  • he still had the issue on his mind while serving in the House in 1992, entering into the Congressional Record a Los Angeles Times op-ed written by Sam Pizzigati, the author of The Maximum Wage. In that piece, Pizzigati details President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s proposal for a “100% war supertax,”
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  • Pizzigati noted that there’s been momentum in recent years to cap executive salaries and bonuses but that “Sanders saw the importance of thinking about that much earlier than everybody else.”
  • Benjamin Spock, who advocated capping incomes and inheritances. Spock believed that “not only should every family of four receive a minimum income of $6,500 annually but the wealthy should be entitled to a maximum income of $50,000 and a minimum annual inheritance of $55,000,” according to a Burlington Free Press article from September of that year.
Bakari Chavanu

Bernie Sanders is the best-known independent and "democratic socialist" in US politics ... - 0 views

  • democratic socialist
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      He uses this term about dozen times.
  • Since the term "socialist" is generally considered an epithet in US politics, and since the two-party system is so powerful, no other prominent politician in recent decades has a similar background
  • He said that in those countries: "Health care is a right of all people and their systems are far more cost-effective than ours." "College education is virtually free." "People retire with better benefits." "Wages that people receive are often higher." "Distribution of wealth and income is much fairer. " "Their public education systems are generally stronger than ours." "By and large, their governments tend to represent the needs of their middle class and working families rather than billionaires and campaign contributors."
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