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Ahmad Al-Shagra

Rumsfeld Knew His Guys Were Torturing People to Death, Which Is a Serious Crime | Corpo... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...eath,_which_is_a_serious_crime

bush torture rights politics obama murder torturing alternet

shared by Ahmad Al-Shagra on 18 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Ahmad Al-Shagra on 18 Feb 09
     
    According to a poll by Gallup the majority of Americans Want Investigations on Possible attempts to use Justice Dept. for political purposes,use of telephone wiretaps without a warrant use of torture in terror interrogations
Skeptical Debunker

Steve King To Conservatives: 'Implode' IRS Offices | TPM LiveWire - 0 views

tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/...atives-implode-irs-offices.php

Steve King suggestion IRS implosion

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • King's comments weren't recorded, but a staffer for Media Matters, who heard the comments, provided TPMmuckraker with an account. The staffer, who requested anonymity because she's not a communications specialist, said that King, an extreme right-winger with a reputation for eyebrow-raising rhetoric, appeared as a surprise guest speaker on an immigration panel at the conservative conference. During his closing remarks, King veered into a complaint about high taxes, and said he could "empathize" with the man who flew a plane into an IRS building last week. During the question and answer session, the Media Matters staffer asked King to clarify his comment, reminding him of his sworn duty to protect the American people from all sworn enemies, foreign and domestic. In response, said the staffer, King gave a long and convoluted answer about having been personally audited by the IRS, and ended by saying he intended to hold a fundraiser to help people "implode" their local IRS office.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10
     
    Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told a crowd at CPAC on Saturday that he could "empathize" with the suicide bomber who last week attacked an IRS office in Austin, and encouraged his listeners to "implode" other IRS offices, according to a witness.
Skeptical Debunker

New health plan puts families 'in control' - UPI.com - 0 views

www.upi.com/...UPI-93561266841395

Obama healthcare plan announced

shared by Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10 - Cached
  • Obama's proposal, posted on WhiteHouse.gov four days before a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders, "puts American families and small-business owners in control of their own healthcare," the White House's explanation said. Among other things, the White House said the proposal would set up a new competitive health insurance market to give millions Americans the same insurance choices congressional members will have. Also, the White House said, the plan would bring greater accountability to the healthcare system by providing "common sense rules of the road" to keep premium costs down, prevent insurance industry abuses and denial of care and end denial of coverage for people with pre-existing conditions. It also includes middle-class tax cuts for healthcare, which the White House said would reduce premium costs for tens of millions of families and small-business owners. The tax breaks would provide affordable health coverage to about 31 million Americans who do not get it today, the explanation said. The White House said the plan would reduce the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 year by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse.
  • Skeptical Debunker on 22 Feb 10
     
    President Barack Obama Monday revealed his new U.S. healthcare reform proposal -- a blend of House and Senate plans along with his own recommendations.
David Corking

CentreRight: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? | Apr 15 2009 - 0 views

conservativehome.blogs.com/...-custodiet-ipsos-custodes.html

Culture

shared by David Corking on 16 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Not wearing a bulky jacket, didn't vault the ticket barrier, didn't resist arrest, wasn't alerted by the shout of 'Armed police' which wasn't ever issued, in fact.
  • Lance Corporal Mark Aspinall. Held down and beaten in a street in Wigan, he was then charged and convicted of assaulting the police, a conviction only over-turned on production of the video evidence
  • The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • It's not only the stereotypical Guardian-reading liberal left who think there's a problem here, and I think it's time that Conservatives made this clear.
  • I ask readers to get a little perspective and try to see the tragic incidents outlined above for what they are, isolated and very rare examples of errors and abuses in policing
  • We all have a vested interest in a police force that is fair, accountable and has the trust of the people it is there to protect.
  • Peel and Mayne were remarkable men to have set down principles that remain as valid one hundred and eighty years on as they were on the day they were penned.
  • David Corking on 16 Apr 09
     
    Conservative blogger asks if there is a culture of violence in the Met.
peoples movement

Watch the Tortured Logic Video -- Torture Memos -- Oliver Stone, Philip Glass, Rosie Pe... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/torturedlogic

accountability torture memos

shared by peoples movement on 17 Aug 09 - Cached
  • peoples movement on 17 Aug 09
     
    Top secret Bush administration memos authorized torture ... They were never meant to be seen or heard by the public. Watch this video and demand a full criminal investigation.
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

www.michaelparenti.org/capitalism%20apocalypse.html

politics economy capitalism

shared by Bakari Chavanu on 16 Oct 09 - Cached
  •  The present economic crisis, however, has convinced even some prominent free-marketeers that something is gravely amiss. Truth be told, capitalism has yet to come to terms with several historical forces that cause it endless trouble: democracy, prosperity, and capitalism itself, the very entities that capitalist rulers claim to be fostering.
  • Some eighty  years ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis commented, “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” Moneyed interests have been opponents not proponents of democracy.
  • In the early days of the Republic the rich and well-born imposed property qualifications for voting and officeholding. They opposed the direct election of candidates (note, their Electoral College is still with us). And for decades they resisted extending the franchise to less favored groups such as propertyless working men, immigrants, racial minorities, and women.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The conservative plutocracy also seeks to rollback democracy’s social gains, such as public education, affordable housing, health care, collective bargaining, a living wage, safe work conditions, a non-toxic sustainable environment; the right to privacy, the separation of church and state, freedom from compulsory pregnancy, and the right to marry any consenting adult of one’s own choosing.
  • About a century ago, US labor leader Eugene Victor Debs was thrown into jail during a strike. Sitting in his cell he could not escape the conclusion that in disputes between two private interests, capital and labor, the state was not a neutral arbiter. The force of the state--with its police, militia, courts, and laws—was unequivocally on the side of the company bosses.
  • Any nation that is not “investor friendly,” that attempts to use its land, labor, capital, natural resources, and markets in a self-developing manner, outside  the dominion of transnational corporate hegemony, runs the risk of being demonized and targeted as “a threat to U.S. national security.”
  • Most of the world is capitalist, and most of the world is neither prosperous nor particularly democratic. One need only think of capitalist Nigeria, capitalist Indonesia, capitalist Thailand, capitalist Haiti, capitalist Colombia, capitalist Pakistan, capitalist South Africa, capitalist Latvia, and various other members of the Free World--more accurately, the Free Market World.
  • Corporate investors prefer poor populations. The poorer you are, the harder you will work—for less. The poorer you are, the less equipped you are to defend yourself against the abuses of wealth.
  • In the corporate world of “free-trade,” the number of billionaires is increasing faster than ever while the number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. Poverty spreads as wealth accumulates.
  • To the extent that life is bearable under the present U.S. economic order, it is because millions of people have waged bitter class struggles to advance their living standards and their rights as citizens, bringing  some measure of humanity to an otherwise heartless politico-economic order.
  • There is a third function of the capitalist state seldom mentioned. It consists of preventing the capitalist system from devouring itself.  Consider the core contradiction Karl Marx pointed to: the tendency toward overproduction and market crisis. An economy dedicated to speedups and wage cuts, to making workers produce more and more for less and less, is always in danger of a crash. To maximize profits, wages must be kept down. But someone has to buy the goods and services being produced. For that, wages must be kept up. There is a chronic tendency—as we are seeing today—toward overproduction of private sector goods and services and underconsumption of necessities by the working populace. 
  • Instead of trying to make money by the arduous task of producing and marketing goods and services, the marauders tap directly into the money streams of the economy itself. During the 1990s we witnessed the collapse of an entire economy in Argentina when unchecked free marketeers stripped enterprises, pocketed vast sums, and left the country’s productive capacity in shambles. The Argentine state, gorged on a heavy diet of free-market ideology, faltered in its function of saving capitalism from the capitalists.
  • These thieves were caught and convicted. Does that not show capitalism’s self-correcting capacity? Not really. The prosecution of such malfeasance— in any case coming too late—was a product of democracy’s accountability and transparency, not capitalism’s. Of itself the free market is an amoral system, with no strictures save caveat emptor.
  • Perhaps the premiere brigand was Bernard Madoff. Described as “a longstanding leader in the financial services industry,” Madoff ran a fraudulent fund that raked in $50 billion from wealthy investors, paying them back “with money that wasn’t there,” as he himself put it. The plutocracy devours its own children.
  • The classic laissez-faire theory is even more preposterous than Greenspan made it.  In fact, the theory claims that everyone should pursue their own selfish interests without restraint.
  • Capitalism breeds the venal perpetrators, and rewards the most unscrupulous among them.  The crimes and crises are not irrational departures from a rational system, but the converse: they are the rational outcomes of a basically irrational and amoral system.
  • Worse still, the ensuing multi-billion dollar government bailouts are themselves being turned into an opportunity for pillage. Not only does the state fail to regulate, it becomes itself a source of plunder, pulling vast sums from the federal money machine, leaving the taxpayers to bleed.
  • But the 2008-09 “rescue operation” offered a record feed at the public trough. More than $350 billion was dished out by a right-wing lame-duck Secretary of the Treasury to the biggest banks and financial houses without oversight--not to mention the more than $4 trillion that has come from the Federal Reserve.  Most of the banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of New York Mellon, stated that they had no intention of letting anyone know where the money was going.
  • In sum, free-market corporate capitalism is by its nature a disaster waiting to happen.
  • If the paladins of Corporate America want to know what really threatens “our way of life,” it is their way of life, their boundless way of pilfering their own system, destroying the very foundation on which they stand, the very community on which they so lavishly feed.
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