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Joe La Fleur

Voter fraud? You ain't seen nothin' yet! - 0 views

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    MORE VOTER FRAUD
Bakari Chavanu

toledoblade.com -- - 0 views

  • He believes our economic system has lost its way after decades of perversion by greedy politicians in Washington and money-minded fatcats on Wall Street and in corporate America.
  • And as the great American dream slipped further from the middle class, more consumers relied on credit cards and loans to catch it, and a system based on people buying what they need became one in which people buy what they want but often cannot afford.
  • Perhaps the film's most powerful statement is Moore's claim that 1 percent of the richest Americans own 95 percent of our nation's wealth.
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  • Capitalism: A Love Story contends that such a movement has already begun. Families being evicted from their homes by bank foreclosures refuse to leave, the film shows, even when law enforcement shows up. A successful workers' strike in Chicago proved that the power to overcome corporate greed and mishandling still rests with the people.
    • Bakari Chavanu
       
      This may be a hopeful way to look at it, but I really doubt it. Most people don't have a clue about what to do. There's very little or effective organized resistance.
  • The film isn't so much Moore piling on our battered, bruised capitalism as it is loaded commentary on what got us here. The evidence is damning, and thought-provoking to those who will give the film a chance.
  • Perhaps Capitalism: A Love Story will be the impetus we need for wholesale change. Or if change is too ambitious, given our circumstances, the film should at least spark meaningful dialogue and rigorous debate, something Moore supporters and detractors alike should welcome.
Levy Rivers

Joseph A. Palermo: Defeating the Bailout Looks Like Another Republican Ploy - 0 views

  • House Republican leaders did not put much pressure on their rank-and-file members to back the rescue package." John Boehner, Roy Blunt and other "leaders" of the House Republicans thought they could strike a public pose as if they really cared about the credit seizure that looms over the country while secretly hoping to pin the bill's passage on Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, (and by association, Barack Obama).
  • They wanted Speaker Pelosi to pass the bill without much Republican cover so they could tell their constituents that the Democrats were just "picking the taxpayers' pockets again."
  • I agree with the critical flaws in the bill that Dennis Kucinich articulated this morning on Amy Goodman's show, Democracy Now! I don't believe in a government welfare program for Wall Street swindlers who had the audacity to pump up the paper value of one of their hidden, unregulated derivatives, "credit default swaps," from $631 billion in 2001 to $62 trillion in 2008! I think some people should be indicted; some people should go to jail.
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  • Whenever you hear the word "bi-partisan," even during the waning hours of the Bush years, it usually means something very bad is about to happen.
  • All of a sudden I hear Bush Administration mouthpieces such as the billionaire Henry Paulson, who in the past have told us that we are all on our own and we shouldn't rely on government for anything, speak about "our" financial markets as if working people have been the ones swapping "collateralized debt obligations" and "hybrid debt instruments."
  • It is my hope we can seize the opportunity this crisis presents, hold President Obama's feet to the fire, and construct a new social compact in this country, a New New Deal.
Skeptical Debunker

Colin Powell Rejects Dick Cheney's Claims, Says U.S. Is Not Less Safe Under Obama (VIDEO) - 0 views

  • Powell pointed out that Obama has kept in place most of the programs enacted by the Bush administration. "The Transportation Security Administration created by George Bush is still in action working in our airports," Powell told host Bob Schieffer. "They take care of me every day that I go to an airport." The Office of the Director of National Intelligence was also created under President Bush, "and it is still under President Obama, working hard," Powell continued. "Our counterterrorism authorities and forces are hard at work. Our law enforcement officials are hard at work. We have gone after the enemy in Afghanistan with 50,000 more troops, more predators are striking al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in Pakistan. We have continued the policies that President Bush put in place with respect to Iraq. And so I don't know where the claim comes that we are less safe."
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    Dick Cheney's charges that the country is less safe because of the way Barack Obama has handled national security matters don't hold water, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday. "To suggest that somehow we have become much less safer because of the actions of the administration, I don't think that's borne out by the facts," Powell said on CBS's "Face the Nation."
Arabica Robusta

ZCommunications | The brutal truth about Tunisia by Robert Fisk | ZNet Article - 0 views

  • For I fear this is going to be the same old story. Yes, we would like a democracy in Tunisia – but not too much democracy. Remember how we wanted Algeria to have a democracy back in the early Nineties?   Then when it looked like the Islamists might win the second round of voting, we supported its military-backed government in suspending elections and crushing the Islamists and initiating a civil war in which 150,000 died.
  • Indeed, what was Hillary Clinton doing last week as Tunisia burned? She was telling the corrupted princes of the Gulf that their job was to support sanctions against Iran, to confront the Islamic republic, to prepare for another strike against a Muslim state after the two catastrophes the United States and the UK have already inflicted in the region.
  • It's the same old problem for us in the West. We mouth the word "democracy" and we are all for fair elections – providing the Arabs vote for whom we want them to vote for.
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  • In Algeria 20 years ago, they didn't. In "Palestine" they didn't. And in Lebanon, because of the so-called Doha accord, they didn't. So we sanction them, threaten them and warn them about Iran and expect them to keep their mouths shut when Israel steals more Palestinian land for its colonies on the West Bank.
David Corking

Replace Police With Spin Doctors « POLICE INSPECTOR BLOG - 0 views

  • testing an age old theory about what happens when you approach a 6ft riot cop and tell him to fuck off repeatedly?
  • I blame Globalisation. Lets test this theory by choosing six other countries in the world, going over to each country one at a time, walking up to a riot cop and telling him to fuck off repeatedly. Compare injuries on return to UK. If you return to UK.
  • Will this person now be arrested for verbally abusing a Police Officer? If not, why not?
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  • canteen culture of the mindless violence of the few backed up by the silence of the many.
  • As an A+E nurse would it be right for me to strike each and every member of the public if and when the became aggressive?
  • The Police should be held to a higher standard than other services, surely you are trained professionals and as such should be able to deal with the provacation in a much more proportional way?
  • it was against their clients human rights to be filmed with out their consent
  • When it’s not practical for you to be arrested because it would take police resources away from the lines then you deserve to get a shove. If you come back, then you deserve to be struck (something home office approved).
  • You ARE PROFESSIONALS and this kind of insta-agression is something that the public could gain at a fraction of the cost from a security guard. No one is denying that being a police officer is a difficult job at times
  • Sadly people are people, maybe he was wrong to hit her, she was maybe wrong for confronting him in the first place. All I can say that is if a uniformed officer tells me not to do something I don’t do it. Full stop.
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    Other countries are worse. So? The rest of us would be jailed for assault if we hit someone with a stick in response to extreme provocation.
Bakari Chavanu

Capitalism's Self-inflicted Apocalypse - 0 views

  •  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.
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  • 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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