Wednesday, March 10, 2010
War Is a Racket is the title of two works, a speech and a booklet, by retired U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of only 19 people to be twice awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, in which Butler frankly discusses from his experience as a career military officer how business interests have commercially [...]
Filed in Documents, Notable, Quotable
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, american empire, Anti-War, Authoritarianism, Civil War, Congress, Fascism, Gulf War, House, Imperialism, Interventionists, Iraq War, Korean War, Law, Liberty Bonds, Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, Military, Nation-Building, Nationalism, Senate, Spanish-American War, USMC, Vietnam War, War, War Profiteers, WW1, WW2
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from [...]
Filed in Notable
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Also tagged Afghanistan War, Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Corporate Welfare, Democracy, Democrats, Despotism, Healthcare, Hedge Funds, Iraq War, Liberals, Media, Militarization, Military, Poverty, Reform, Republicans, Tea Party, Wall Street, Wealth
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Citing anti-competitive concerns, the Justice Department sued Election Systems & Software in order to force the company to divest itself of the voting machine assets it obtained from Premier Election Solutions [Diebold] last year.
The department’s antitrust division, along with nine state attorneys general, filed the civil antitrust lawsuit (.pdf) in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Antitrust, Corporate Mergers, Courts, Diebold, DOJ, Elections, ESS, Law, Monopolies, Premier Election Solutions, Voting Machines
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Wednesday, March 10, 2010
When the state-friendly Russian oil company Surgutneftegas held its annual shareholders meeting in the Siberian city of Surgut two years ago, the proceedings in the shabby auditorium started off as tightly scripted as a Politburo meeting. That is, until the moderator called for questions and Alexei Navalny took the stage. In front of some 300 [...]
Saturday, February 13, 2010
3. You present the question of the draft as a moral issue for society, and you trace it from the draft riots of the Civil War to the present day. Politicians today appear broadly to support a professional army as a way of avoiding the public controversy presented by the draft. It also means that [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Civic Duty, Common Good, Conscription, Conservatives, Consumerism, Democrats, Ethics, Executive Compensation, Fairness, Justice, Liberals, Libertarians, Military, Morality, Morals, Pay Inequity, Religion, Republicans, The Draft, Wages, War
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Friday, February 12, 2010
In a single hour, two men with blatant, undisclosed conflicts of interest had appeared on MSNBC. The question is, was this an isolated oversight or business as usual? Evidence points to the latter. In 2003 The Nation exposed McCaffrey’s financial ties to military contractors he had promoted on-air on several cable networks; in 2008 David Barstow [...]
Filed in Journalism, News Blurbs
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Also tagged AIG, CNBC, CNN, Conflict of Interest, Disclosure, Ethics, Executive Compensation, Fox Business Network, Fox News, Journalism, Lobbyists, Media, MSNBC, PR, Television
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Thursday, February 11, 2010
So why isn’t this called The Great Depression II?
The data, which are for the fourth quarter, come from a new study (.pdf) by Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada and Sheila Palma at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies. The researchers conclude that “what has been missing from the public debate over the labor market crisis [...]
Is there any hope at all that the larger players in the Bush-era criminal activities – Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove, Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz most prominently – will be brought to justice when those two lesser lights (Yoo and Bybee) are allowed to return to a law school classroom and a seat on the federal [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Accountability, Barack Obama, Condoleezza Rice, Corruption, Crime, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, George W Bush, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, Karl Rove, Law, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Rule of Law, War Crimes, William Rivers Pitt
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By bailing out the markets, we only subsidized the foolishness that created the disaster in the first place. The incompetents were allowed to keep their jobs. And not only keep their jobs—they reaped huge rewards.
Worse, by playing up the “response to crisis” view of the bail out—think about all of the discussion around Bernanke’s performance—we [...]
You’ve heard plenty about the big banks’ role in the Great Recession, but their headaches are about to get worse.
At a packed hearing today, the Senate investigations subcommittee led by Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) shed new light on banks’ negligence and wrongdoing—and this time it’s not credit-default swaps or derivatives but money laundering and arms dealers. The [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Angola, Bailouts, Bank of America, Banking, Carl Levin, Citibank, Corruption, Crime, Financial Sector, Great Recession, HSBC, Lobbyists, Money Laundering, Senate, Shell Corporations
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, scolded Wall Street representatives at a hearing Thursday for sending “an army of lobbyists whose only mission is to kill the common-sense financial reforms” needed by the public. “The fact is,” Dodd said, “I am frustrated, and so are the American people.” He charged that [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged AIG, Bailouts, Banking, Bonuses, Christopher Dodd, Congress, Executive Compensation, Financial Sector, Goldman Sachs, Great Recession, Lobbyists, Reform, Senate
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Thursday, February 4, 2010
The 325-page report by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which will conduct a hearing on Thursday, sheds new light on how banks like Citigroup, Wachovia and Bank of America unwittingly shifted hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of African politicians, their relatives and associates.
The banks ended up closing or restricting the accounts and cooperated [...]
Filed in News Blurbs
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Also tagged Bailouts, Bank of America, Banking, Carl Levin, Citigroup, Corruption, Financial Sector, Fraud, Money Laundering, PEP, Regulation, Shell Corporations, Wachovia
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Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Brooks has audacity, I’ll give him that. Too bad his premise is as phony as a three-dollar bill. But Brooks is far from alone in advancing what I call the Myth of the Greedy Geezer, in which old people’s selfish attachment to their entitlements is the primary cause of the nation’s economic woes, and entitlement cuts are [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
A PR firm announces plans to run for Congress. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad…
“It’s our democracy,” declares public relations firm, Murray Hill Inc, in a press release explaining why the corporation is running for Congress. “We bought it, we paid for it, and we’re going to keep it.”
Within seconds of the [...]
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
The recent Supreme Court decision to allow unlimited corporate spending in politics just may be the straw that breaks the plutocracy’s back.
Pro-democracy groups, business leaders, and elected representatives are proposing mechanisms to prevent or counter the millions of dollars that corporations can now draw from their treasuries to push for government action favorable to their [...]
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