Having just finished reading Black Elk Speaks, Leonard Peltier's recent letter brings the plight of Native Americans over the last two centuries into present focus. Someone reading the 1932 classic today might easily believe that while it is a tragic tale of America's bitter origins, it is a story firmly rooted in a past that we have long moved on from. This view, sadly, would be mistaken. As Peltier states in his letter, Barack Obama must now take on the burden of covering up the mistreatment and oppression of present-day natives.
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Sometimes, the mainstream press does a good job, and today's investigative feature in the New York Times serves as an excellent example of what all journalism should look like: journalism that puts the people's interests above corporate interests.
The Times has compiled an interactive database that shows water pollution violations in all 50 states. A look at documented violations in Kansas totals 33, with the total amount paid for these violations racking up to a whopping ZERO dollars. Well that's justice in America, where the American people get cancer, rashes, and rotting teeth from fowl water, and America's corporation's get off with more subsidies, lax regulations, and hefty profits for their CEOs. Check out the article after the jump - Tim Hjersted
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Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi On "How Goldman Sachs Has Engineered Every Major Market Manipulation Since The Great Depression"The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.
Any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.
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Fourteen minute video featuring straight talk from veterans and their family members telling what is missing from the sales pitches presented by recruiters and the military's marketing efforts.
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CIA director Leon Panetta told the New Yorker: "When you read behind it, it's almost as if he's wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point." News commentator Ed Schultz said today that Cheney is wishing for a terrorist attack on the U.S.
What should we make of all this? Well, everyone knows that Cheney is ruthless: Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. The former director of the CIA accused Cheney of overseeing American torture policies. Cheney is also the guy who:
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The Senate Commerce Committee appears to be poised to confirm Julius Genachowski, President Barack Obama's choice to head the Federal Communications Commission.
In a hearing that lasted around 90 minutes Tuesday afternoon, Democrat and Republican lawmakers praised Genachowski, with committee chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) going so far as to say he was "thoroughly impressed" with the nominee.
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Montana Senator Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, is the Senate’s point man on healthcare reform. A new article in the Montana Standard finds that Senator Baucus has received more campaign money from health and insurance industry interests than any other member of Congress.
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It may not be as exciting as the Thrilla in Manila, but its outcome will have far more impact on the lives of tens of millions of families across the country. The story is straightforward. President Obama had stepped up to challenge the insurance industry in order to reform the health care system in the United States.
Specifically, he is proposing to create a public health insurance plan, like Medicare, that people would have the option to buy into. Ideally, this would ensure that everyone had a good health insurance option available to them and provide real competition to the existing private plans.
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As of last Monday, the Kansas Governor, Mark Parkinson, traded a 900MW coal fired plant for a tepid state energy policy, and the Legislature went along. The agreement first of all forces the Secretary of KDHE to issue Sunflower Electric an air quality permit, and it also limits his authority to issue air quality regulations beyond the Federal EPA guidelines. In return, it creates a true 1:1 bidirectional net metering, but ONLY for investor-owned utilities, not for rural electric co-ops of small municipal utilities. The agreement also establishes a Renewable Energy Standard (RES), but with a meager goal of 20% by 2020.
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With the release of the U.S. Senate's report on the Bush Administration torture program, it is now incontrovertibly clear -- and officially established by the highest, most respectable Establishment institutions -- that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and a host of other top officials deliberately, willingly, and with malice aforethought, established a system of interrogation using brutal techniques that they knew were against the law. Hence the need for the torture memos that attempted to give retroactive legal cover for atrocities that were already taking place at the orders of the White House and the Pentagon. They were also told repeatedly that these tortures were ineffective at producing useful intelligence.
What's more, it is now undeniable that they began this program long before they had captured even one "high-profile al Qaeda detainee," and that they were using these heinous techniques not in a desperate bid to save the nation from further attacks -- which has long been their preening, self-serving claim -- but instead to produce spurious data about the non-existent link between Iraq and al Qaeda. In other words, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ordered their minions to beat and torment captives in order to get them to say something a -- anything -- that could then be used to "justify" a war of aggression that these grand statesmen had been planning long before the September 11 attacks.
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For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.
There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing at least the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).
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Should President Obama have the power to shut down domestic Internet traffic during a state of emergency?
Senators John Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) think so. On Wednesday they introduced a bill to establish the Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor—an arm of the executive branch that would have vast power to monitor and control Internet traffic to protect against threats to critical cyber infrastructure. That broad power is rattling some civil libertarians.
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Last September Ecuador approved a constitutional amendment that protects the rights of Pachamama, Mother Earth. By affirming the rights of nature, “where life is reproduced and exists,” Ecuador is offering the world a way out of one of the blindest of the many blind alleys Western thinking has created.
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As our 44th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support, and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash, and so does the economy.
Little wonder that Obama is being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered the White House in similar financial straits in 1932. Even before taking office, Obama has started his version of the “fireside chats” (updated from radio to online video) given by Roosevelt nearly weekly to reassure the public. He said on November 22 that he plans to create 2.5 million new jobs by 2011 and kick-start the economy by building roads and bridges, modernizing schools, and creating technology and infrastructure for renewable energy. These are excellent ideas, but what will they be funded with—more government debt?
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Though Citicorp is deemed too big to fail, it's hardly reassuring to know that it's been allowed to sink its fangs into the Mother Zombie that the US Treasury has become and sucked out a multi-billion dollar dose of embalming fluid so it can go on pretending to be a bank for a while longer.
I employ this somewhat clunky metaphor to point out that the US Government is no more solvent than the financial zombies it is keeping on walking-dead support. And so this serial mummery of weekend bailout schemes is as much of a fraud and a swindle as the algorithm-derived-securities shenanigans that induced the disease of bank zombification in the first place. The main question it raises is whether, eventually, the creation of evermore zombified US dollars will exceed the amount of previously-created US dollars now vanishing into oblivion through compressive debt deflation.
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Here we stand in the wake of the virtual financial tsunami, followed by the giant bail out. In the words of the next generation, I guess you could say, "we should have known better."
We just witnessed a full week of Wall Street experts on television threatening the American people, and President Bush threatening Congress, claiming that “to do nothing” will result in a economic crisis- possibly a depression. So constituents called their Congressional representatives telling them to “do something”. No one is entirely sure what that something should be, so most Congressmen and women guessed that ‘something’ must be a $700 Billion ‘get-out-of-jail card’ for the bankers.
In the Bailout Bill, Congress is proclaiming an era of reform and that there will be "Sweeping new powers for the US Treasury", powers not reviewed, and run by committees which they, the bankers, have set up. Total power. No oversight. What you have on paper are the bankers now openly running government. They have the power to create money and regulate themselves.
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