Grumbling
over the Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens United continue
to rumble like distant thunder. Will the decision go down in history
as one more in the Court's long line of egregious opinions? Likely!
Will it have much effect on the American political landscape? Likely
not! Simply ask yourself, how much worse can it get?
There is
scant evidence that the Congressional attempts to limit corporate
expenditures in electioneering have had any effect in reducing
corporate influence in government. Expecting the Congress, most if
not all of whose members reside deep in corporate pockets, to
eliminate that influence can be likened to expecting the rhinovirus
to eliminate the common cold. Corporate money is the diseased
life-blood of American politics; it carries its cancerous spores to
all extremities.
The Supreme
Court really should be named the Unbeseem Court. Without any
Constitutional justification whatsoever, as Justice Holmes,
dissenting in Lochner, pointed out, the Court has taken its task to
be the constitutionalization of a totally immoral, rapacious,
economic system instead of the promotion of justice, domestic
tranquility, the general welfare, and the blessings of liberty.
Consider this short list of examples:
·
It is legal for a vendor to sell a product which does
not work but illegal for a buyer to purchase a product with a check
that does not work.
·
During a corporate bankruptcy, the company's assets
are distributed first to other companies and last, if anything
remains, to employees and even people who have obtained judgments
from courts for company wrongdoing.
·
If a homebuyer who has paid regularly on his mortgage
for 20 and even more years, who has paid the property taxes and the
property's insurance, is forced to default for no fault of his own,
such as a death, serious illness, or economic collapse, the mortgage
holder gets to keep all the money and gets the house too,
transferring the risk that investors are supposed to bear entirely
to the buyer.
·
Entire industries can uniformly require consumers to
accept contracts that require them to relinquish their legal and
even Constitutional rights.
·
And those industries can also uniformly require
consumers to accept contracts that the companies can change in any
way at any time for any reason without gaining the consent of the
consumer. Has a consumer ever had such a right?
·
Companies can collect personal information on people
without their consent yet are allowed to keep company secrets even
those which hide wrongdoing, as when a civil case is settled and the
company involved is allowed to not admit to any wrongdoing and the
court seals the detailed record..........Read
Article
Israel: Attacks on New
Israel Fund, Critical Groups, Threaten Civil Society
- February 8 - The growing harshness of attacks by Israeli
government officials on nongovernmental organizations poses a
real threat to civil society in Israel, Human Rights Watch
said today.
The most recent attacks center on the New Israel Fund (NIF),
which supports a wide range of Israeli civil rights and social
welfare organizations, including some that provided
information to the United Nations fact-finding mission under
Justice Richard Goldstone that investigated abuses by both
sides in last year's Gaza conflict. ....Read
Article
A Very American Coup:
Coming Soon to a Hometown Near You
by William Astore
The wars in distant lands were always going to come home, but not
this way.
It's September 2016, year 15 of America's "Long
War" against terror. As weary troops return to the homeland,
a bitter reality assails them: despite their sacrifices, America
is losing.
Iraq is increasingly hostile to remaining occupation forces.
Afghanistan is a riddle that remains unsolved: its army and
police forces are
untrustworthy, its government corrupt, and its tribal
leaders unsympathetic to the vagaries of U.S. intervention.
Since the Obama surge of 2010, a trillion more dollars have been
devoted to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, and other countries in
the vast
shatter zone that is central Asia, without measurable
returns; nothing, that is, except the prolongation of America's
Great Recession, now entering its tenth year without a sustained
recovery in sight......Read
Article.
Israel Crushes Local
Dissent, Attacks Global Criticism
by Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH - Israel is lashing out at international criticism and
attempting to crush local dissent in what appears to be growing
sensitivity to reproach of its policies.
Several recent incidents have dominated media headlines, including
the arrest of a Jewish-American journalist on the grounds of
security, threats by an Israeli minister against international
diplomats and the arrest of Israeli and Palestinian peace
activists......Read
Article.
Haiti's
Tragic History Is Entwined with the Story of America
In announcing the U.S. response to
Haiti's devastating earthquake, President Obama noted the two
countries' historic ties. But few Americans know that sad story.
Announcing emergency help for Haiti after a devastating
7.0-magnitude earthquake, President Barack Obama noted America’s
historic ties to the impoverished Caribbean nation, but few
Americans understand how important Haiti’s contribution to U.S.
history was.
In modern times, when Haiti does intrude on U.S. consciousness,
it’s usually because of some natural disaster or a violent political
upheaval, and the U.S. response is often paternalistic, if not
tinged with a racist disdain for the country’s predominantly black
population and its seemingly endless failure to escape cycles of
crushing poverty.........Read
Article
Who Would Benefit Politically from
a Terrorist Incident on American Soil? The Strange Case of Umar
Farouk Abdul Mutallab
Despite some $40
billion dollars spent by the American people on airline security
since 2001, allegedly to thwart attacks on the Heimat, the
botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab to bring down
Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day was
foiled, not by a bloated counterterrorist bureaucracy, but by the
passengers themselves.
Talk about
validating that old Wobbly slogan: Direct action gets the goods!
And yet, the
closer one looks at the available evidence surrounding the strange
case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the more sinister alleged
"intelligence failures" become. As this story unfolds it is becoming
abundantly clear that U.S. security officials had far more
information on the would-be lap bomber than we've been told.
The Observer
revealed
January 3 that the British secret state had Abdulmutallab on their
radar for several years and that he had become "politically
involved" with "extremist networks" while a student at University
College London, where he served as president of the Islamic Society.
Examining "e-mail
and text traffic," security officers claim to have belatedly
discovered that "he has been in contact with jihadists from across
the world since 2007."............Read
Article
Who's
Getting Rich From the Naked Full-Body Scanner Boom?
The TSA has a dismal record of enriching
private corporations with failed technologies. Will the "digital
strip search" device just bring more of the same?
Scan, baby, scan. That’s the mantra among politicians at all
levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a
Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the
would-be “underwear bomber” could have been stopped by airport
security if he’d been put through a full-body scanner, which would
have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab’s groin.
Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was
talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that
could stop this type of attack. In announcing
hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman
approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one
of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to
answer" was "Why isn’t whole-body-scanning technology that can
detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief
Michael Chertoff told
the Washington Post, "You’ve got to find some way of
detecting things in parts of the body that aren’t easy to get
at. It’s either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad
guys haven’t figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it
out.".........Read
Article