Group items tagged

"Quasi-Corporatism: America's Homegrown Fascism". By Robert Higgs. The Freeman and The Independent Institute. January 31, 2006.

"Quasi-Corporatism: America's Homegrown Fascism". By Robert Higgs. The Freeman and The Independent Institute. January 31, 2006.

Where to put the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA), which will centralize the writing and (to some degree) enforcement of federal financial regulations on such things as mortgages, savings accounts, and consumer debt. Should it be an independent agency, like the Securities and Exchange Commission, or a subunit of the Treasury Department or the Federal Reserve?

...the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009 Goldstone Report Finds Israeli Military Guilty of War Crimes in Gaza The Independent reports that a United Nations fact-finding inquiry has found that Israel committed war crimes during its attack on Gaza last winter, as did the Palestinian Hamas. The lion's share of blame in the report, however, falls on Israeli forces, which stand accused of planning out a disproportionate use of force, the punishing of a civilian population, and reckless disregard for civilian lives-- all of which are war crimes in international law. The report suggests that some Israeli actions may have gone beyond being mere war crimes to being crimes against humanity. The report will go to the UN Human Rights Commission, which will likely accept it. The findings could in theory drag Israeli officials before the World Court in the Hague, though in practice this outcome is highly unlikely. Both the Israeli government and Hamas rejected the report as biased, which is a pretty good indication that it is even-handed.

Sanders/Dodd Audit-The-Fed allows audit of TARP + TALF, but not FOMC, discount window operations, or agreement with foreign central banks. "Even the so called "independent" leftists, Kucinich and Sanders, have both capitulatied to the corporate, class markets and their class despotism, proving they are not real opposition leaders, but phony socialists, phony anti war activists." ~Eric Albert Schwing I read all three versions of the Sanders amendment carefully, and I believe Sanders made a good call if the decision was compromise with Dodd or have no amendment at all. The big differences with the compromise are: -Single audit covering December 1,2007 to May 2010 rather than open-ended audit until all bailout funds are recovered. -Specific parameters on the audit focusing on whether proper procedures were followed and what could be done to improve Fed governance. However it is not clear that the audit is limited to these items. -Fed website still must report lots of previously undisclosed details about the bailout measured-who got what and why. ~bmull

"Senator Bernard Sanders, independent of Vermont, has agreed to modify a proposal that would require public audits of the Federal Reserve in a potential compromise"

The story of 23-year-old Omar Kadhr, held by our gov't as a suspected terrorist for 8 years, since he was 15