----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@gmail.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 7:43 AM
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Not only did Reagan play to people's racism, fears, and feelings of
superiority, he was so superficial, so phony that I doubt Ronald Reagan ever
knew who he was.
We Americans just love to be charmed by the Corporate Pied Pipers, somehow
believing that we are them. But we are not them. And in that, our own
identity has been stolen from us by the snake charmers, like Ronald Reagan.
I am saddened by the thought that as the Empire builds this phony tribute
around this phony man, we will never know the number of lives crushed by his
ruthlessness.
We were vacationing in Hawaii in April of 1987, and I sat each morning
watching Oliver North and John Poindexter lie and fumble their way around
their roles in the Iran/Contra Affair.
Out of that Mass Media Blitz came a new Oliver North, a defender of freedom
and the American People. And John Poindexter became everybody's kindly
grandfather. And there sat the Wizard, himself. Ronald Reagan, already
forgetting what was going on around him, but still possessing the Golden
Tongue.
And all the while, as these sorry excuses for men played their roles in this
Grade B Soap Opera, I heard nothing of the thousands of lives wiped out or
ruined by their greed and ruthlessness.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 6:32 AM
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
I'm not reluctant to say I voted for those people for President. At least
they promised the right things. Reagan, on the other hand, played to
people's racism, fears, and feelings of superiority.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 1:22 AM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Ted,
We all have skeletons in our political closets.
I reluctantly admit that I voted for Barak Obama in 2008, Bill Clinton,
twice, Jimmy Carter, LBJ, JFK and Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson did us the
least harm. Who knows what he might have done had he been elected.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 8:28 PM
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Both of my parents voted for Reagan as governor in the 1960s. And, in 1984,
the first Presidential election in which I voted, I voted for him, too. It
has only been in hindsight that both my mom and I realized what a bad
president he was (though my mom blames him maybe not as much as me). My
mom's two wealthy older brothers (though they're not part of the 1%), who
earned that wealth via stints at Lockheed and other parts of the defense
industry, still revere Mr. Reagan. Given their successes, one can see why.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
I've mentioned that I've been reading this book about Reagan. He was
horrible back in the 50's. He was saying terrible things in the 60's. One
wonders about the sanity of the Californians who voted for him to be
Governor. Not only was he saying terrible things, but he lied and
manipulated, and he consistently teamed up with the FBI.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:18 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
And in fact, poverty, as we poor folk know, is caused by greedy wealthy
people, sitting on their butts in swank offices on Wall Street.
You know, if we changed the name to Skid Road, and called their elite gated
communities, "Ghettos", it would better reflect the charge that lazy bums
and ghetto dwellers are the root of our economical woes.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "blind-democracy" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:05 PM
Subject: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News &
info from the #1 progressive radio show
Hi to all.
People tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of the truth.
The point hits home with today's blog post from Thom Hartmann.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
----
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/03/useful-idiots-corporate-elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
Submitted by Thom Hartmann A... on 18. March 2014 - 11:43 Live Blog Thom's
Blog
There are a whole lot of useful idiots in America. Yesterday, a caller
called into my radio show, and echoed Congressman Paul Ryan's recent
comments, blaming the black community for poverty in America. He threw out
a Fox So-Called News phony statistic, arguing that "73 percent of
African-American women in this country ages 17-35 have children without a
man in the house, and the majority of this group of people live in the
cities."
First of all, that is completely false. According to the most recent
government statistics, 72 percent of black babies are born to unmarried
mothers today. But that is completely different from saying that "73 percent
of African-American women in this country have children without a man in the
house." It's a perfect demonstration of the old saying, often attributed to
Mark Twain, that, "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."
In fact, the birth rate for unmarried black women in America has been
falling for almost 40 years. And most of the evidence points to changes in
unmarried birth rates among both black and white women in America that
started in the 1970s, coinciding with the legalization of abortion and the
beginning of widespread use of oral contraceptives, and largely unaffected
over the years by changes in welfare programs.
So, why is it that Conservatives like yesterday's caller, Fox So-Called
News' useful idiots, and Congressman Paul Ryan are obsessed with the notion
that blacks and the black community are responsible for poverty in America?
Like so much that's wrong with America today, it all started with Reagan.
Reagan is famous for his speeches and one-liners about "welfare queens," but
as author Ian Haney Lopez pointed out in an interview on Moyers and Company,
it all began with his earliest welfare stump speech in 1980. Reagan would
speak to (white) Americans, and say something along the lines of, "I
understand how frustrating it is for you when you're standing in line at a
grocery store waiting to buy hamburger, and there's some young fellow ahead
you waiting to by a T-Bone with food stamps."
But, as Lopez points out, the first time Reagan gave that stump speech,
"young fellow" was replaced with "young buck," a racially-coded term for a
young black man. Basically, Reagan was telling white Americans that they
were being taken advantage of by blacks on food stamps, and that it was made
possible by the government taking their money through taxes and then giving
it to undeserving black people.
So, in response to the outrage that he drummed up, Reagan suggested his
infamous tax cuts, dropping the top rate that billionaires pay from 74% down
to 28%. After all, he told middle-class voters - who got a very small income
tax cut - why should you pay taxes to a government that's just turning
around and giving that money to undeserving black people who are using it to
eat fancy steak dinners?
This is very similar to the recent outrage over at Fox about people on food
stamps buying crab and lobster, something that's possible but so rare that
it has no effect on the overall tax we all pay for food stamps. Lopez goes
on to say that, for the past 50 years, Republicans have been telling white
Americans that the biggest threat in their lives are minorities, and that
minorities have taken over government and are eating up all the money.
Just last week, Congressman Paul Ryan went on Bill Bennett's Morning in
America program, and said that, "We have got this tailspin of culture, in
our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of
men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of
work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt
with." In other words, Ryan is saying that lazy black men are responsible
for poverty in America.
For some 50 years now, Republicans have been using race-baiting tactics and
dog-whistle politics like this to convince Americans that the black
community is behind poverty in America, but that's just not the case. After
all, you can see many of the same trends in the largely white Appalachia
region of the U.S. as you do in minority-heavy inner cities. In Appalachia,
white Americans are struggling with poverty, and having children
out-of-wedlock, just like their black inner-city counterparts.
And according to the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends
project, in 2012, the median net worth of a white household was $91,405,
while the median net worth of a black household was $6,446. So a black child
starts out at a very different place than a white child, both economically
and socially. But Conservatives still argue that blacks are behind poverty
in America. The social and cultural problems that we see in black
communities across America, and in white communities in Appalachia, are
responses to poverty, not the causes of it.
It's time for Americans, and lawmakers in Washington, to wake up, and start
talking about the real causes of poverty in America, which include massive
inequality produced by our tax code, joblessness produced by our trade
policies, and ongoing discrimination by a largely white economic and
political power structure. Only then will every American have an equal shot
at the American Dream, regardless of their race.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Fw: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News & info from the #1 progressive radio show
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@gmail.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 7:49 AM
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
I repeat. Ronald Reagan was a superficial image, reflecting the face
projected on him by the Ruling Classes Media. Ronald Reagan was an actor.
Get it? An Actor! Not an especially good actor on the screen, but well
groomed and practiced in the role of President. Ronald Reagan played
President of the United States of America. He had no original ideas, no
personal philosophy...other than self-serving, no deep feelings at all.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. And he was a vain man, and he was a vindictive
man.
And to think that he has been compared to FDR? We should blush with shame.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 6:25 AM
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Well, there are two reasons why I find him so abominable. One is his
political and social view of the world. One can either agree or disagree.
But the other is his self interest and how, I think, that was more important
to how he behaved politically, than his views.
Miriame
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 11:28 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Both of my parents voted for Reagan as governor in the 1960s. And, in 1984,
the first Presidential election in which I voted, I voted for him, too. It
has only been in hindsight that both my mom and I realized what a bad
president he was (though my mom blames him maybe not as much as me). My
mom's two wealthy older brothers (though they're not part of the 1%), who
earned that wealth via stints at Lockheed and other parts of the defense
industry, still revere Mr. Reagan. Given their successes, one can see why.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
I've mentioned that I've been reading this book about Reagan. He was
horrible back in the 50's. He was saying terrible things in the 60's. One
wonders about the sanity of the Californians who voted for him to be
Governor. Not only was he saying terrible things, but he lied and
manipulated, and he consistently teamed up with the FBI.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:18 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
And in fact, poverty, as we poor folk know, is caused by greedy wealthy
people, sitting on their butts in swank offices on Wall Street.
You know, if we changed the name to Skid Road, and called their elite gated
communities, "Ghettos", it would better reflect the charge that lazy bums
and ghetto dwellers are the root of our economical woes.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "blind-democracy" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:05 PM
Subject: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News &
info from the #1 progressive radio show
Hi to all.
People tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of the truth.
The point hits home with today's blog post from Thom Hartmann.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
----
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/03/useful-idiots-corporate-elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
Submitted by Thom Hartmann A... on 18. March 2014 - 11:43 Live Blog Thom's
Blog
There are a whole lot of useful idiots in America. Yesterday, a caller
called into my radio show, and echoed Congressman Paul Ryan's recent
comments, blaming the black community for poverty in America. He threw out
a Fox So-Called News phony statistic, arguing that "73 percent of
African-American women in this country ages 17-35 have children without a
man in the house, and the majority of this group of people live in the
cities."
First of all, that is completely false. According to the most recent
government statistics, 72 percent of black babies are born to unmarried
mothers today. But that is completely different from saying that "73 percent
of African-American women in this country have children without a man in the
house." It's a perfect demonstration of the old saying, often attributed to
Mark Twain, that, "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."
In fact, the birth rate for unmarried black women in America has been
falling for almost 40 years. And most of the evidence points to changes in
unmarried birth rates among both black and white women in America that
started in the 1970s, coinciding with the legalization of abortion and the
beginning of widespread use of oral contraceptives, and largely unaffected
over the years by changes in welfare programs.
So, why is it that Conservatives like yesterday's caller, Fox So-Called
News' useful idiots, and Congressman Paul Ryan are obsessed with the notion
that blacks and the black community are responsible for poverty in America?
Like so much that's wrong with America today, it all started with Reagan.
Reagan is famous for his speeches and one-liners about "welfare queens," but
as author Ian Haney Lopez pointed out in an interview on Moyers and Company,
it all began with his earliest welfare stump speech in 1980. Reagan would
speak to (white) Americans, and say something along the lines of, "I
understand how frustrating it is for you when you're standing in line at a
grocery store waiting to buy hamburger, and there's some young fellow ahead
you waiting to by a T-Bone with food stamps."
But, as Lopez points out, the first time Reagan gave that stump speech,
"young fellow" was replaced with "young buck," a racially-coded term for a
young black man. Basically, Reagan was telling white Americans that they
were being taken advantage of by blacks on food stamps, and that it was made
possible by the government taking their money through taxes and then giving
it to undeserving black people.
So, in response to the outrage that he drummed up, Reagan suggested his
infamous tax cuts, dropping the top rate that billionaires pay from 74% down
to 28%. After all, he told middle-class voters - who got a very small income
tax cut - why should you pay taxes to a government that's just turning
around and giving that money to undeserving black people who are using it to
eat fancy steak dinners?
This is very similar to the recent outrage over at Fox about people on food
stamps buying crab and lobster, something that's possible but so rare that
it has no effect on the overall tax we all pay for food stamps. Lopez goes
on to say that, for the past 50 years, Republicans have been telling white
Americans that the biggest threat in their lives are minorities, and that
minorities have taken over government and are eating up all the money.
Just last week, Congressman Paul Ryan went on Bill Bennett's Morning in
America program, and said that, "We have got this tailspin of culture, in
our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of
men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of
work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt
with." In other words, Ryan is saying that lazy black men are responsible
for poverty in America.
For some 50 years now, Republicans have been using race-baiting tactics and
dog-whistle politics like this to convince Americans that the black
community is behind poverty in America, but that's just not the case. After
all, you can see many of the same trends in the largely white Appalachia
region of the U.S. as you do in minority-heavy inner cities. In Appalachia,
white Americans are struggling with poverty, and having children
out-of-wedlock, just like their black inner-city counterparts.
And according to the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends
project, in 2012, the median net worth of a white household was $91,405,
while the median net worth of a black household was $6,446. So a black child
starts out at a very different place than a white child, both economically
and socially. But Conservatives still argue that blacks are behind poverty
in America. The social and cultural problems that we see in black
communities across America, and in white communities in Appalachia, are
responses to poverty, not the causes of it.
It's time for Americans, and lawmakers in Washington, to wake up, and start
talking about the real causes of poverty in America, which include massive
inequality produced by our tax code, joblessness produced by our trade
policies, and ongoing discrimination by a largely white economic and
political power structure. Only then will every American have an equal shot
at the American Dream, regardless of their race.
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
From: "Carl Jarvis" <carjar82@gmail.com>
To: "Blind Democracy Discussion List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 7:49 AM
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
I repeat. Ronald Reagan was a superficial image, reflecting the face
projected on him by the Ruling Classes Media. Ronald Reagan was an actor.
Get it? An Actor! Not an especially good actor on the screen, but well
groomed and practiced in the role of President. Ronald Reagan played
President of the United States of America. He had no original ideas, no
personal philosophy...other than self-serving, no deep feelings at all.
Ronald Reagan was an actor. And he was a vain man, and he was a vindictive
man.
And to think that he has been compared to FDR? We should blush with shame.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 6:25 AM
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Well, there are two reasons why I find him so abominable. One is his
political and social view of the world. One can either agree or disagree.
But the other is his self interest and how, I think, that was more important
to how he behaved politically, than his views.
Miriame
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of ted chittenden
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 11:28 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: RE: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
Both of my parents voted for Reagan as governor in the 1960s. And, in 1984,
the first Presidential election in which I voted, I voted for him, too. It
has only been in hindsight that both my mom and I realized what a bad
president he was (though my mom blames him maybe not as much as me). My
mom's two wealthy older brothers (though they're not part of the 1%), who
earned that wealth via stints at Lockheed and other parts of the defense
industry, still revere Mr. Reagan. Given their successes, one can see why.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
---- Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
I've mentioned that I've been reading this book about Reagan. He was
horrible back in the 50's. He was saying terrible things in the 60's. One
wonders about the sanity of the Californians who voted for him to be
Governor. Not only was he saying terrible things, but he lied and
manipulated, and he consistently teamed up with the FBI.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:18 PM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News
& info from the #1 progressive radio show
And in fact, poverty, as we poor folk know, is caused by greedy wealthy
people, sitting on their butts in swank offices on Wall Street.
You know, if we changed the name to Skid Road, and called their elite gated
communities, "Ghettos", it would better reflect the charge that lazy bums
and ghetto dwellers are the root of our economical woes.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "ted chittenden" <tchittenden@cox.net>
To: "blind-democracy" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:05 PM
Subject: The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite | Thom Hartmann - News &
info from the #1 progressive radio show
Hi to all.
People tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of the truth.
The point hits home with today's blog post from Thom Hartmann.
--
Ted Chittenden
Every story has at least two sides if not more.
----
http://www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2014/03/useful-idiots-corporate-elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
The Useful Idiots of the Corporate Elite
Submitted by Thom Hartmann A... on 18. March 2014 - 11:43 Live Blog Thom's
Blog
There are a whole lot of useful idiots in America. Yesterday, a caller
called into my radio show, and echoed Congressman Paul Ryan's recent
comments, blaming the black community for poverty in America. He threw out
a Fox So-Called News phony statistic, arguing that "73 percent of
African-American women in this country ages 17-35 have children without a
man in the house, and the majority of this group of people live in the
cities."
First of all, that is completely false. According to the most recent
government statistics, 72 percent of black babies are born to unmarried
mothers today. But that is completely different from saying that "73 percent
of African-American women in this country have children without a man in the
house." It's a perfect demonstration of the old saying, often attributed to
Mark Twain, that, "Figures don't lie, but liars can figure."
In fact, the birth rate for unmarried black women in America has been
falling for almost 40 years. And most of the evidence points to changes in
unmarried birth rates among both black and white women in America that
started in the 1970s, coinciding with the legalization of abortion and the
beginning of widespread use of oral contraceptives, and largely unaffected
over the years by changes in welfare programs.
So, why is it that Conservatives like yesterday's caller, Fox So-Called
News' useful idiots, and Congressman Paul Ryan are obsessed with the notion
that blacks and the black community are responsible for poverty in America?
Like so much that's wrong with America today, it all started with Reagan.
Reagan is famous for his speeches and one-liners about "welfare queens," but
as author Ian Haney Lopez pointed out in an interview on Moyers and Company,
it all began with his earliest welfare stump speech in 1980. Reagan would
speak to (white) Americans, and say something along the lines of, "I
understand how frustrating it is for you when you're standing in line at a
grocery store waiting to buy hamburger, and there's some young fellow ahead
you waiting to by a T-Bone with food stamps."
But, as Lopez points out, the first time Reagan gave that stump speech,
"young fellow" was replaced with "young buck," a racially-coded term for a
young black man. Basically, Reagan was telling white Americans that they
were being taken advantage of by blacks on food stamps, and that it was made
possible by the government taking their money through taxes and then giving
it to undeserving black people.
So, in response to the outrage that he drummed up, Reagan suggested his
infamous tax cuts, dropping the top rate that billionaires pay from 74% down
to 28%. After all, he told middle-class voters - who got a very small income
tax cut - why should you pay taxes to a government that's just turning
around and giving that money to undeserving black people who are using it to
eat fancy steak dinners?
This is very similar to the recent outrage over at Fox about people on food
stamps buying crab and lobster, something that's possible but so rare that
it has no effect on the overall tax we all pay for food stamps. Lopez goes
on to say that, for the past 50 years, Republicans have been telling white
Americans that the biggest threat in their lives are minorities, and that
minorities have taken over government and are eating up all the money.
Just last week, Congressman Paul Ryan went on Bill Bennett's Morning in
America program, and said that, "We have got this tailspin of culture, in
our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of
men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of
work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt
with." In other words, Ryan is saying that lazy black men are responsible
for poverty in America.
For some 50 years now, Republicans have been using race-baiting tactics and
dog-whistle politics like this to convince Americans that the black
community is behind poverty in America, but that's just not the case. After
all, you can see many of the same trends in the largely white Appalachia
region of the U.S. as you do in minority-heavy inner cities. In Appalachia,
white Americans are struggling with poverty, and having children
out-of-wedlock, just like their black inner-city counterparts.
And according to the Pew Research Center's Social and Demographic Trends
project, in 2012, the median net worth of a white household was $91,405,
while the median net worth of a black household was $6,446. So a black child
starts out at a very different place than a white child, both economically
and socially. But Conservatives still argue that blacks are behind poverty
in America. The social and cultural problems that we see in black
communities across America, and in white communities in Appalachia, are
responses to poverty, not the causes of it.
It's time for Americans, and lawmakers in Washington, to wake up, and start
talking about the real causes of poverty in America, which include massive
inequality produced by our tax code, joblessness produced by our trade
policies, and ongoing discrimination by a largely white economic and
political power structure. Only then will every American have an equal shot
at the American Dream, regardless of their race.
_______________________________________________
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Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
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Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during 2014
Subject: Re: Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran
during 2014
I think of the cost of murdering people around the globe, and I can't help
but wonder what sort of life would we all have if that bloody money had been
used to improve life, rather than destroy it?
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 8:06 AM
Subject: Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during
2014
Haaretz Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during 2014
Despite talks between Iran and West, senior officers tell MKs 10b shekels
($2.9b) allocated to IDF to prepare for possible attack.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.580701
By Barak Ravid
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon have
ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on
Iran's nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89
billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according
to recent statements by senior military officers.
Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings
on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say
they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion
shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations
for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in
2013.
Some MKs asked the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot,
and planning directorate official Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel whether they felt
there was justification for investing so much money in those preparations,
said the MKs present at the meetings, who asked that their names be withheld
because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said some lawmakers also asked
whether the interim agreement reached between Iran and the six powers in
November 2013, and the ongoing negotiations for a full nuclear accord, had
caused any change in the IDF's preparations.
The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from
government officials from the political echelon - meaning Netanyahu and
Ya'alon - to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel
on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between
Iran and the West, the three MKs said.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit declined to respond to questions by Haaretz on
the matter, as did the Prime Minister's Office.
Ever since the interim accord between Iran and the six powers was reached,
Netanyahu has stressed that Israel will not consider itself bound by it. In
the last few weeks, as talks on a permanent accord have resumed, Netanyahu
has upped his rhetoric on the Iranian issue, and is again making implied
threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear
sites.
"My friends, I believe that letting Iran enrich uranium would open up the
floodgates," Netanyahu said at the AIPAC conference earlier this month.
"That must not happen. And we will make sure it does not happen."
Ya'alon recently indicated during a speech at Tel Aviv University that his
view has shifed and he is now likely to support a unilateral Israeli strike
on Iran, in light of his assessment that the Obama administration will not
do so.
"We think that the United States should be the one leading the campaign
against Iran," Ya'alon said this week. "But the U.S. has entered talks with
them and unfortunately, in the haggling in the Persian bazaar, the Iranians
were better. ... Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we
have nobody to look out for us but ourselves."
The second round of nuclear talks opened in Vienna on Tuesday, with the
participation of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton,
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif and senior diplomats from the
six powers. This was followed by a session involving the Iranian delegation
and representatives of the six powers, and by separate meetings between
Iranian representatives and representatives from each delegation. The U.S.
and Iranian negotiating teams also met.
After the first day of talks, Ashton's spokesman, Michael Mann, described
them as "positive, serious and substantive." Iranian media reported that
officials with the Iranian delegation said this round of talks will focus on
how much uranium enrichment Iran will be permitted as part of a final
accord, along with the future of the heavy water plant at Arak and the
lifting of sanctions.
In an opinion piece in Britain's Financial Times this week, Zarif argued
that his country is not seeking nuclear weapons and said the West's
suspicions will threaten Iran's national security. Nuclear weapons are a
tool of the past, Zarif argued, writing: "Israel's nuclear arsenal was of
little help in Lebanon in 2006."
Zarif said Iran must convince the West that it is not seeking nuclear arms,
citing the fatwa ostensibly written by supreme leader Ali Khamenei that
forbids the production of nuclear weapons. The exact language of this fatwa
has never been made public.
"Few now doubt that the only way to ensure that Iran's nuclear energy
programme will remain exclusively peaceful is to reach a mutually acceptable
agreement," wrote Zarif. "This shift did not occur overnight. It was
prompted by the realisation that coercion, pressure and sanctions only
result in more centrifuges, more resentment and deeper mistrust."
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"New Profile" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to newprofile+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
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Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/newprofile.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Haaretz
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during 2014
Despite talks between Iran and West, senior officers tell MKs 10b shekels
($2.9b) allocated to IDF to prepare for possible attack.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.580701
By Barak Ravid
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon have
ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on
Iran's nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89
billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according
to recent statements by senior military officers.
Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings
on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say
they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion
shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations
for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in
2013.
Some MKs asked the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot,
and planning directorate official Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel whether they felt
there was justification for investing so much money in those preparations,
said the MKs present at the meetings, who asked that their names be withheld
because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said some lawmakers also asked
whether the interim agreement reached between Iran and the six powers in
November 2013, and the ongoing negotiations for a full nuclear accord, had
caused any change in the IDF's preparations.
The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from
government officials from the political echelon - meaning Netanyahu and
Ya'alon - to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel
on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between
Iran and the West, the three MKs said.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit declined to respond to questions by Haaretz on
the matter, as did the Prime Minister's Office.
Ever since the interim accord between Iran and the six powers was reached,
Netanyahu has stressed that Israel will not consider itself bound by it. In
the last few weeks, as talks on a permanent accord have resumed, Netanyahu
has upped his rhetoric on the Iranian issue, and is again making implied
threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear
sites.
"My friends, I believe that letting Iran enrich uranium would open up the
floodgates," Netanyahu said at the AIPAC conference earlier this month.
"That must not happen. And we will make sure it does not happen."
Ya'alon recently indicated during a speech at Tel Aviv University that his
view has shifed and he is now likely to support a unilateral Israeli strike
on Iran, in light of his assessment that the Obama administration will not
do so.
"We think that the United States should be the one leading the campaign
against Iran," Ya'alon said this week. "But the U.S. has entered talks with
them and unfortunately, in the haggling in the Persian bazaar, the Iranians
were better. ... Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we
have nobody to look out for us but ourselves."
The second round of nuclear talks opened in Vienna on Tuesday, with the
participation of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton,
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif and senior diplomats from the
six powers. This was followed by a session involving the Iranian delegation
and representatives of the six powers, and by separate meetings between
Iranian representatives and representatives from each delegation. The U.S.
and Iranian negotiating teams also met.
After the first day of talks, Ashton's spokesman, Michael Mann, described
them as "positive, serious and substantive." Iranian media reported that
officials with the Iranian delegation said this round of talks will focus on
how much uranium enrichment Iran will be permitted as part of a final
accord, along with the future of the heavy water plant at Arak and the
lifting of sanctions.
In an opinion piece in Britain's Financial Times this week, Zarif argued
that his country is not seeking nuclear weapons and said the West's
suspicions will threaten Iran's national security. Nuclear weapons are a
tool of the past, Zarif argued, writing: "Israel's nuclear arsenal was of
little help in Lebanon in 2006."
Zarif said Iran must convince the West that it is not seeking nuclear arms,
citing the fatwa ostensibly written by supreme leader Ali Khamenei that
forbids the production of nuclear weapons. The exact language of this fatwa
has never been made public.
"Few now doubt that the only way to ensure that Iran's nuclear energy
programme will remain exclusively peaceful is to reach a mutually acceptable
agreement," wrote Zarif. "This shift did not occur overnight. It was
prompted by the realisation that coercion, pressure and sanctions only
result in more centrifuges, more resentment and deeper mistrust."
--
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
during 2014
I think of the cost of murdering people around the globe, and I can't help
but wonder what sort of life would we all have if that bloody money had been
used to improve life, rather than destroy it?
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2014 8:06 AM
Subject: Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during
2014
Haaretz Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during 2014
Despite talks between Iran and West, senior officers tell MKs 10b shekels
($2.9b) allocated to IDF to prepare for possible attack.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.580701
By Barak Ravid
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon have
ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on
Iran's nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89
billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according
to recent statements by senior military officers.
Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings
on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say
they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion
shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations
for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in
2013.
Some MKs asked the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot,
and planning directorate official Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel whether they felt
there was justification for investing so much money in those preparations,
said the MKs present at the meetings, who asked that their names be withheld
because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said some lawmakers also asked
whether the interim agreement reached between Iran and the six powers in
November 2013, and the ongoing negotiations for a full nuclear accord, had
caused any change in the IDF's preparations.
The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from
government officials from the political echelon - meaning Netanyahu and
Ya'alon - to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel
on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between
Iran and the West, the three MKs said.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit declined to respond to questions by Haaretz on
the matter, as did the Prime Minister's Office.
Ever since the interim accord between Iran and the six powers was reached,
Netanyahu has stressed that Israel will not consider itself bound by it. In
the last few weeks, as talks on a permanent accord have resumed, Netanyahu
has upped his rhetoric on the Iranian issue, and is again making implied
threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear
sites.
"My friends, I believe that letting Iran enrich uranium would open up the
floodgates," Netanyahu said at the AIPAC conference earlier this month.
"That must not happen. And we will make sure it does not happen."
Ya'alon recently indicated during a speech at Tel Aviv University that his
view has shifed and he is now likely to support a unilateral Israeli strike
on Iran, in light of his assessment that the Obama administration will not
do so.
"We think that the United States should be the one leading the campaign
against Iran," Ya'alon said this week. "But the U.S. has entered talks with
them and unfortunately, in the haggling in the Persian bazaar, the Iranians
were better. ... Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we
have nobody to look out for us but ourselves."
The second round of nuclear talks opened in Vienna on Tuesday, with the
participation of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton,
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif and senior diplomats from the
six powers. This was followed by a session involving the Iranian delegation
and representatives of the six powers, and by separate meetings between
Iranian representatives and representatives from each delegation. The U.S.
and Iranian negotiating teams also met.
After the first day of talks, Ashton's spokesman, Michael Mann, described
them as "positive, serious and substantive." Iranian media reported that
officials with the Iranian delegation said this round of talks will focus on
how much uranium enrichment Iran will be permitted as part of a final
accord, along with the future of the heavy water plant at Arak and the
lifting of sanctions.
In an opinion piece in Britain's Financial Times this week, Zarif argued
that his country is not seeking nuclear weapons and said the West's
suspicions will threaten Iran's national security. Nuclear weapons are a
tool of the past, Zarif argued, writing: "Israel's nuclear arsenal was of
little help in Lebanon in 2006."
Zarif said Iran must convince the West that it is not seeking nuclear arms,
citing the fatwa ostensibly written by supreme leader Ali Khamenei that
forbids the production of nuclear weapons. The exact language of this fatwa
has never been made public.
"Few now doubt that the only way to ensure that Iran's nuclear energy
programme will remain exclusively peaceful is to reach a mutually acceptable
agreement," wrote Zarif. "This shift did not occur overnight. It was
prompted by the realisation that coercion, pressure and sanctions only
result in more centrifuges, more resentment and deeper mistrust."
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"New Profile" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
email to newprofile+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to newprofile@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/newprofile.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. Haaretz
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Netanyahu orders IDF to prepare for possible strike on Iran during 2014
Despite talks between Iran and West, senior officers tell MKs 10b shekels
($2.9b) allocated to IDF to prepare for possible attack.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.580701
By Barak Ravid
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon have
ordered the army to continue preparing for a possible military strike on
Iran's nuclear facilities at a cost of at least 10 billion shekels ($2.89
billion) this year, despite the talks between Iran and the West, according
to recent statements by senior military officers.
Three Knesset members who were present at Knesset joint committee hearings
on Israel Defense Forces plans that were held in January and February say
they learned during the hearings that 10 billion shekels to 12 billion
shekels of the defense budget would be allocated this year for preparations
for a strike on Iran, approximately the same amount that was allocated in
2013.
Some MKs asked the army's deputy chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot,
and planning directorate official Brig. Gen. Agai Yehezkel whether they felt
there was justification for investing so much money in those preparations,
said the MKs present at the meetings, who asked that their names be withheld
because of the sensitivity of the issue. They said some lawmakers also asked
whether the interim agreement reached between Iran and the six powers in
November 2013, and the ongoing negotiations for a full nuclear accord, had
caused any change in the IDF's preparations.
The IDF representatives said the army had received a clear directive from
government officials from the political echelon - meaning Netanyahu and
Ya'alon - to continue readying for a possible independent strike by Israel
on the Iranian nuclear sites, regardless of the talks now happening between
Iran and the West, the three MKs said.
The IDF Spokesperson's Unit declined to respond to questions by Haaretz on
the matter, as did the Prime Minister's Office.
Ever since the interim accord between Iran and the six powers was reached,
Netanyahu has stressed that Israel will not consider itself bound by it. In
the last few weeks, as talks on a permanent accord have resumed, Netanyahu
has upped his rhetoric on the Iranian issue, and is again making implied
threats about a possible unilateral Israeli strike on the Iranian nuclear
sites.
"My friends, I believe that letting Iran enrich uranium would open up the
floodgates," Netanyahu said at the AIPAC conference earlier this month.
"That must not happen. And we will make sure it does not happen."
Ya'alon recently indicated during a speech at Tel Aviv University that his
view has shifed and he is now likely to support a unilateral Israeli strike
on Iran, in light of his assessment that the Obama administration will not
do so.
"We think that the United States should be the one leading the campaign
against Iran," Ya'alon said this week. "But the U.S. has entered talks with
them and unfortunately, in the haggling in the Persian bazaar, the Iranians
were better. ... Therefore, on this matter, we have to behave as though we
have nobody to look out for us but ourselves."
The second round of nuclear talks opened in Vienna on Tuesday, with the
participation of European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton,
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Jawad Zarif and senior diplomats from the
six powers. This was followed by a session involving the Iranian delegation
and representatives of the six powers, and by separate meetings between
Iranian representatives and representatives from each delegation. The U.S.
and Iranian negotiating teams also met.
After the first day of talks, Ashton's spokesman, Michael Mann, described
them as "positive, serious and substantive." Iranian media reported that
officials with the Iranian delegation said this round of talks will focus on
how much uranium enrichment Iran will be permitted as part of a final
accord, along with the future of the heavy water plant at Arak and the
lifting of sanctions.
In an opinion piece in Britain's Financial Times this week, Zarif argued
that his country is not seeking nuclear weapons and said the West's
suspicions will threaten Iran's national security. Nuclear weapons are a
tool of the past, Zarif argued, writing: "Israel's nuclear arsenal was of
little help in Lebanon in 2006."
Zarif said Iran must convince the West that it is not seeking nuclear arms,
citing the fatwa ostensibly written by supreme leader Ali Khamenei that
forbids the production of nuclear weapons. The exact language of this fatwa
has never been made public.
"Few now doubt that the only way to ensure that Iran's nuclear energy
programme will remain exclusively peaceful is to reach a mutually acceptable
agreement," wrote Zarif. "This shift did not occur overnight. It was
prompted by the realisation that coercion, pressure and sanctions only
result in more centrifuges, more resentment and deeper mistrust."
--
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
Somewhere in my past childhood, I read a little book that showed an owlish
looking bird. It said, "This is a watch bird, watching you".
Later in the book was another bird with the heading, "This is a watch bird,
watching the watch bird".
I do believe that the good senator has found herself being watched by her
own birds.
As we all are.
Carl
> Subject: What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA
> Spying?
>
>
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> ________________________________________
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>>
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "the CIA hired a team of outside
>> contractors-who
>> otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents-to
>> read,
>> multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced,
>> before
>> providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the
>> committee's
>> oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are
>> clearly
>> acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. To say the least,
>> this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand
>> factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "after noting the
>> disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study
>> and the
>> Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a
>> printed
>> portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure
>> room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the
>> Hart
>> Senate Office Building."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA's Detention and
>> Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in
>> the
>> CIA's Counterterrorism Center-the unit within which the CIA managed and
>> carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official
>> termination of
>> the Detention and Interrogation Program in January 2009, he was the
>> unit's
>> chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our
>> study.
>> And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of
>> Justice on the actions of congressional staff-the same congressional
>> staff
>> who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA
>> officers-including
>> the acting general counsel himself-provided inaccurate information to
>> the
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>>
>>
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>> ________________________________________
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> Home > What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "the CIA hired a team of outside
>> contractors-who
>> otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents-to
>> read,
>> multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced,
>> before
>> providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the
>> committee's
>> oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are
>> clearly
>> acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. To say the least,
>> this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand
>> factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "after noting the
>> disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study
>> and the
>> Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a
>> printed
>> portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure
>> room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the
>> Hart
>> Senate Office Building."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA's Detention and
>> Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in
>> the
>> CIA's Counterterrorism Center-the unit within which the CIA managed and
>> carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official
>> termination of
>> the Detention and Interrogation Program in January 2009, he was the
>> unit's
>> chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our
>> study.
>> And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of
>> Justice on the actions of congressional staff-the same congressional
>> staff
>> who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA
>> officers-including
>> the acting general counsel himself-provided inaccurate information to
>> the
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>>
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blind-Democracy mailing list
>> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
>> http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
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looking bird. It said, "This is a watch bird, watching you".
Later in the book was another bird with the heading, "This is a watch bird,
watching the watch bird".
I do believe that the good senator has found herself being watched by her
own birds.
As we all are.
Carl
> Subject: What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA
> Spying?
>
>
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> ________________________________________
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>>
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "the CIA hired a team of outside
>> contractors-who
>> otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents-to
>> read,
>> multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced,
>> before
>> providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the
>> committee's
>> oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are
>> clearly
>> acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. To say the least,
>> this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand
>> factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "after noting the
>> disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study
>> and the
>> Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a
>> printed
>> portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure
>> room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the
>> Hart
>> Senate Office Building."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA's Detention and
>> Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in
>> the
>> CIA's Counterterrorism Center-the unit within which the CIA managed and
>> carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official
>> termination of
>> the Detention and Interrogation Program in January 2009, he was the
>> unit's
>> chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our
>> study.
>> And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of
>> Justice on the actions of congressional staff-the same congressional
>> staff
>> who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA
>> officers-including
>> the acting general counsel himself-provided inaccurate information to
>> the
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>>
>>
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>> ________________________________________
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> Home > What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>>
>> Truthdig [1] / By Robert Scheer [2]
>>
>> What Took Dianne Feinstein So Long to Get Fed Up with CIA Spying?
>> March 12, 2014 |
>> It was a truly historic moment on Tuesday when Senate Intelligence
>> Committee
>> Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA's
>> continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our
>> Constitutional
>> division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned
>> as "the
>> horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have
>> existed," the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the
>> agency's
>> outrages have finally aroused the senator's umbrage.
>> As Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, chair of the Judiciary Committee that will be
>> investigating Feinstein's charges noted, "in 40 years here, it was
>> one of
>> the best speeches I'd ever heard and one of the most important." That
>> was
>> particularly so, given that Feinstein's searing indictment of the CIA's
>> decade-long subversion of congressional oversight of its torture program
>> comes from a senator who previously has worked overtime to justify the
>> subversion of democratic governance by the CIA and other spy agencies.
>> But clearly the lady has by now had enough, given the CIA's recent
>> hacking
>> of her Senate committee's computers in an effort to suppress a key
>> piece of
>> evidence supporting the veracity of the committee's completed but
>> still not
>> released 6,300- page study that the CIA is bent on suppressing.
>> The Senate's investigation began in earnest with the Dec. 7, 2007
>> revelation
>> in the New York Times that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of its
>> "enhanced
>> interrogation techniques," despite objections from then-President Bush's
>> director of National Security and the White House counsel. At that time,
>> then-committee chair Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., sent staffers to begin
>> the
>> painstaking process of reviewing the limited material that the CIA was
>> willing to make available; their preliminary report wasn't issued until
>> early 2009.
>> By then, Feinstein had assumed the chairmanship and, as she recalled
>> in her
>> Tuesday speech, "The resulting staff report was chilling. The
>> interrogations
>> and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detention sites were far
>> different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them
>> to us."
>> Feinstein, ostensibly backed by new President Barack Obama, who had
>> campaigned as an opponent of the CIA's methods, obtained the committee's
>> bipartisan backing for an expanded investigation. But the CIA, led at
>> the
>> time by Obama appointee Leon Panetta, the former democratic
>> congressman, put
>> numerous logistical obstacles in the way of the Senate investigation.
>> As Feinstein pointed out, "the CIA hired a team of outside
>> contractors-who
>> otherwise would not have had access to these sensitive documents-to
>> read,
>> multiple times, each of the 6.2 million pages of documents produced,
>> before
>> providing them to fully-cleared committee staff conducting the
>> committee's
>> oversight work. This proved to be a slow and very expensive process."
>> It was so slow that the committee's investigation has only now been
>> completed. Along the way, documents that Senate staffers found
>> interesting
>> would then mysteriously disappear from the system. One such set of
>> disappeared documents, referred to as the "Internal Panetta Review,"
>> is now
>> at the center of the CIA hacking scandal.
>> The Panetta Review became relevant last June, when the CIA offered its
>> critique of the Senate study. But as Feinstein points out, "Some of
>> those
>> important parts that the CIA now disputes in our committee study are
>> clearly
>> acknowledged in the CIA's own Internal Panetta Review. To say the least,
>> this is puzzling. How can the CIA's official response to our study stand
>> factually in conflict with its own Internal Review?"
>> Relations between the Senate committee responsible for oversight of
>> the CIA
>> and the agency were so poor that, as Feinstein states, "after noting the
>> disparity between the official CIA response to the committee study
>> and the
>> Internal Panetta Review, the committee staff securely transported a
>> printed
>> portion of the draft Internal Panetta Review from the committee's secure
>> room at the CIA-leased facility to the secure committee spaces in the
>> Hart
>> Senate Office Building."
>> Feinstein defended the committee staff's spiriting information away
>> from the
>> CIA:
>> "As I have detailed, the CIA has previously withheld and destroyed
>> information about its Detention and Interrogation Program ... there
>> was a
>> need to preserve and protect the Internal Panetta Review in the
>> committee's
>> own secure spaces."
>> The response of the CIA was to hack the computers that Senate
>> staffers had
>> been using at the CIA off-site location, and the agency's acting general
>> counsel filed a crimes report with the Department of Justice against the
>> Senate committee's staff.
>> That was too much for Feinstein, who outed the CIA's counsel:
>> "I should note that for most, if not all, of the CIA's Detention and
>> Interrogation Program, the now acting general counsel was a lawyer in
>> the
>> CIA's Counterterrorism Center-the unit within which the CIA managed and
>> carried out this program. From mid-2004 until the official
>> termination of
>> the Detention and Interrogation Program in January 2009, he was the
>> unit's
>> chief lawyer. He is mentioned by name more than 1,600 times in our
>> study.
>> And now this individual is sending a crimes report to the Department of
>> Justice on the actions of congressional staff-the same congressional
>> staff
>> who researched and drafted a report that details how CIA
>> officers-including
>> the acting general counsel himself-provided inaccurate information to
>> the
>> Justice Department about the program."
>> Enough said, except that White House spokesman Jay Carney put the
>> president
>> on the side of those like current CIA Director John Brennan covering up
>> torture: "The president has great confidence in John Brennan and
>> confidence
>> in our intelligence community and in our professionals at the CIA." It's
>> something that George W. Bush would have said.
>> See more stories tagged with:
>> dianne feinstein [3],
>> cia [4],
>> Senator Patrick Leahy [5],
>> leon panetta [6],
>> CIA Detention and Interrogation Program [7]
>>
>> Source URL:
>> http://www.alternet.org/what-took-dianne-feinstein-so-long-get-fed-cia-spyin
>>
>> g
>> Links:
>> [1] http://www.truthdig.com/
>> [2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-scheer
>> [3] http://www.alternet.org/tags/dianne-feinstein-0
>> [4] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-0
>> [5] http://www.alternet.org/tags/senator-patrick-leahy
>> [6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/leon-panetta-0
>> [7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/cia-detention-and-interrogation-program
>> [8] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Blind-Democracy mailing list
>> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
>> http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
> _______________________________________________
> Blind-Democracy mailing list
> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
> http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>
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Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average Ukrainians)
Subject: Re: Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average
Ukrainians)
Awhile back a member of the ACB became peeved at me and offered to buy me a
ticket to any place on the planet...one way, if I didn't like our wonderful
nation.
And he could afford to do it, too!
But the fact is, I like it here. My People are here, children, grand
children, great grandson, sisters...etc.
Why does this man think that my concern for the well-being of my people
means that I want to leave.
Would I prefer Russia? Hell no! Nor can I think of another country where I
would prefer to live.
Perhaps the Ruling Class in other nations look and dress differently, but
they still are the Ruling Class, and they still tend to want to stay in
power, at the expense of their people.
What I want to see is a ground-swell reform of how we Humans govern
ourselves. You know, like mother taught us? Share with one another? Treat
others the way you want them to treat you? Like that?
But so long as we are shoving one another aside in our attempt to grab the
brass ring...or the pot of gold, we will never place Human Compassion in its
proper place.
No, no thanks to my fellow ACBers offer. I plan to stick around and sound
off whenever I think I have something to sound off about.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:35 AM
Subject: RE: Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average
Ukrainians)
Yes, except one of the reports on Democracy Now indicated that there was no
alternative on the ballot to stay with Ukraine. The alternatives were, do
you want to join Russia or do you want to be independent from Russia.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Marsha
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:21 AM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average
Ukrainians)
Hi
I think I must have lost some of my brain power. Even if the elections
were not as they should be, doesn't the overwhelming support for joining
Russia mean something? What is the reason for not supporting the elections?
haven't these folks suffered enough that they might know what they want? I
really don't understand it all. I consider myself as knowledgeable but this
is beyond me. Thanks for a bit of info in small words and sentences.
Marsha
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Ukrainians)
Awhile back a member of the ACB became peeved at me and offered to buy me a
ticket to any place on the planet...one way, if I didn't like our wonderful
nation.
And he could afford to do it, too!
But the fact is, I like it here. My People are here, children, grand
children, great grandson, sisters...etc.
Why does this man think that my concern for the well-being of my people
means that I want to leave.
Would I prefer Russia? Hell no! Nor can I think of another country where I
would prefer to live.
Perhaps the Ruling Class in other nations look and dress differently, but
they still are the Ruling Class, and they still tend to want to stay in
power, at the expense of their people.
What I want to see is a ground-swell reform of how we Humans govern
ourselves. You know, like mother taught us? Share with one another? Treat
others the way you want them to treat you? Like that?
But so long as we are shoving one another aside in our attempt to grab the
brass ring...or the pot of gold, we will never place Human Compassion in its
proper place.
No, no thanks to my fellow ACBers offer. I plan to stick around and sound
off whenever I think I have something to sound off about.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:35 AM
Subject: RE: Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average
Ukrainians)
Yes, except one of the reports on Democracy Now indicated that there was no
alternative on the ballot to stay with Ukraine. The alternatives were, do
you want to join Russia or do you want to be independent from Russia.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On Behalf Of Marsha
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 6:21 AM
To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
Subject: Re: Who Benefits From Ukraine's Economic Crisis? (Hint: Not Average
Ukrainians)
Hi
I think I must have lost some of my brain power. Even if the elections
were not as they should be, doesn't the overwhelming support for joining
Russia mean something? What is the reason for not supporting the elections?
haven't these folks suffered enough that they might know what they want? I
really don't understand it all. I consider myself as knowledgeable but this
is beyond me. Thanks for a bit of info in small words and sentences.
Marsha
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes Mockery of Open Government
Subject: Re: 'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration
Makes Mockery of Open Government
Unlike our last president, Barak Obama sounds very intelligent when he
speaks. Still, does it matter if the words are bumbled or if they are
brilliant? If they smell Brown, look brown, and taste brown, it's still
Bullshit!
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 6:59 PM
Subject: 'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes
Mockery of Open Government
Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by FireDogLake
'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes Mockery
of Open Government
by Kevin Gosztola
Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, he pledged to have his
administration create an "unprecedented level of openness in government."
Then-chief of staff, Jack Lew, later contended the administration was the
"most transparent administration ever." At a rally in 2010, Obama told the
public, "We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest
transparency rules of any administration in history." But this slogan
suggesting the Obama administration is the "most transparent" ever has been
nothing but a marketing ploy, the product of an administration that
Advertising Age recognized as "marketer of the year" in 2008.
The Associated Press conducted its annual review of government data related
to the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the "government's efforts
to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since
President Barack Obama took office."
While the AP could not tell if the public was simply requesting more
sensitive information than the previous year, the administration claimed a
record number of "national security" exemptions. A record number of times
the administration also withheld information and cited a "deliberative
process" exemption, claiming it dealt with "decision-making behind the
scenes" so could not be released.
"[T]he government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully
denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On
196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a
person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to
be unreasonable or improper," according to the AP.
Plus, "Journalists and others who need information quickly to report
breaking news fared worse than ever last year."
.Blocking news organizations from urgently obtaining records about a
government scandal or crisis - such as the NSA's phone-records collection,
Boston bombings, trouble with its health care website, the deadly shootings
at the Washington Navy Yard or the attack on the diplomatic mission in
Benghazi - can delay uncovering significant developments until after
decisions are made and the public's interest has waned.
A request AP submitted for information on "contracts with public relations
companies to promote Obama's health care law" has been pending for over an
year. The AP has also been waiting for over ten months to receive emails
"between the IRS and outside Democratic super PACs about Tea Party groups."
Agencies are taking longer to respond to requests too. The AP noted, "The
Pentagon reported at least two requests still pending after 10 years and the
CIA was still working on at least four requests from more than eight years
ago." (But, the White House, for some reason, claimed it was responding
"more quickly" to FOIA requests. AP mentioned the White House did not
elaborate on how it arrived at this conclusion.)
Some of the more stunning episodes in the administration's efforts to be the
"most transparent"-which in effect is more secretive-administration in
history include conduct in the midst of disclosures from former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been fighting the administration for the
release of information that would detail secret legal interpretations of a
section of the PATRIOT Act. Once Snowden began to reveal details related to
what the administration had kept secret, Director for National Intelligence
James Clapper had the agency put up an "IC on the Record" Tumblr where
documents could be posted. The administration disingenuously made it seem
like it was voluntarily posting the documents, however, after Snowden's
disclosures began, a court ordered the administration to begin declassifying
documents that EFF had requested.
The Justice Department fought the release of a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court opinion, which underpinned the PRISM program that Snowden
revealed.
This year, in January, a case brought by EFF ended with a federal appeals
court in Washington, DC, ruling that the Justice Department could keep
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions secret. EFF had sought the release of
an opinion because it "purportedly allows the FBI to access the private call
records of phone company subscribers without providing any legal process."
The New York Times reacted, "The office's advice often serves as the final
word on what the executive branch may legally do, and those who follow that
advice are virtually assured that they will not face prosecution."
Secret legal opinions have often been drafted to authorize illegal activity,
such as torture, warrantless wiretapping and the killing of American
citizens with drones. The Obama administration has succeeded in keeping
legal opinions secret-essentially expanding a growing body of secret law
(that was much growing even more vast before Snowden blew the whistle on top
secret surveillance by the NSA).
However, the department did lose a lawsuit filed by Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A federal appeals court
ruled the department had tried to pervert freedom of information law with
its preferred legal interpretation that government agencies were only
required to communicate a "determination" on whether they would comply
within 20 working days.
By law, as the court ruling described, "A FOIA requester must exhaust
administrative appeal remedies before seeking judicial redress. But if an
agency does not adhere to certain statutory timelines in responding to a
FOIA request, the requester is deemed by statute to have fulfilled the
exhaustion requirement." That means the requester can appeal or sue the
agency for the release of documents.
The administration effectively would have created a Catch-22 that further
limited citizens' ability to challenge government when agencies refused to
release information.
The AP reported in June of last year, "The nation's top special operations
commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin
Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to
the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made
public." This clearly appears to be a circumvention of freedom of
information law.
The administration also refused requests for photos of bin Laden possibly
because, according to a member of SEAL Team Six who was part of the raid,
"Operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition
into Bin Laden's body," and, "When all was said and done, UBL had over a
hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate."
The release of White House visitor logs was fought by the Obama
administration, and the administration won in an appeals court last August.
According to the National Security Archive, "Nearly half (50 out of 101) of
all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act
regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more
agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President
Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a 'presumption of
disclosure.'"
The administration seems to expend resources and energy trying to develop
strategies to block the release of information to the public more than it
spends working to fulfill its pledge to be transparent.
It would not release GPS location tracking memos that would have showed how
the Justice Department interpreted the law in the aftermath of a major
Supreme Court decision. (A court ruled in favor of this secrecy last week.)
For years now, the ACLU has been fighting the government in court as it
maintains it should be able to conceal information on the "targeted
killings" of three US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his
16-year-old son, and Samir Khan.
The ACLU also has two other FOIA lawsuits the Obama administration has
fought-one for the "legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones"
and a lawsuit for information on a December 2009 missile strike the
administration launched on al Majalah in Yemen, which killed dozens of
civilians including 21 children.
As ProPublica outlined in November, even though Obama made some kind of a
promise that his administration would share more information on drones, the
groups considered to be "associated forces" of al Qaeda remain classified.
Whether any compensation has been paid to drone victims is unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out if strikes are, in fact, US drone strikes
because officials will not confirm them.
The administration has largely avoided confronting government secrecy,
especially the culture in Washington, which reinforces such secrecy. That
has made leaks of government information even more critical to enhancing the
public's understanding (but if Obama has his way, this flow of information
will be stopped entirely too).
Gannett News noted recently, "A study by researchers at Penn State
University found that government denials of the public's requests for
information increased during the first three years of the Obama
administration compared to the last three years of the George W. Bush
administration."
Each year the Obama administration has become progressively worse at
openness in government and yet it still promotes this illusion that it has
this sterling record when it comes to transparency.
In the CIA's fight against the Senate's torture report, the administration
has sought to invoke executive privilege to an alarming extent in order to
cover up abuses.
Not only is the Obama administration not the "most transparent
administration ever," it has become the inverse of the "most transparent
administration ever." It is now one of the most secretive administrations
ever, outpacing Bush in his commitment to keep government actions concealed
from the public.
C 2014 FireDogLake
Kevin Gosztola is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose blog, The
Dissenter, is posted at FireDogLake.
more Kevin Gosztola
. E-mail
. Print
. Share
Twitter Facebook Digg Google Google Buzz
StumbleUpon Delicous Newsvine Yahoo
More...
________________________________________
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/17-9
Return
. /forward?path=node%2F103547
. /view/2014/03/17-9?print
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valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by FireDogLake
'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes Mockery
of Open Government
by Kevin Gosztola
Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, he pledged to have his
administration create an "unprecedented level of openness in government."
Then-chief of staff, Jack Lew, later contended the administration was the
"most transparent administration ever." At a rally in 2010, Obama told the
public, "We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest
transparency rules of any administration in history." But this slogan
suggesting the Obama administration is the "most transparent" ever has been
nothing but a marketing ploy, the product of an administration that
Advertising Age recognized as "marketer of the year" in 2008.
The Associated Press conducted its annual review of government data related
to the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the "government's efforts
to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since
President Barack Obama took office."
While the AP could not tell if the public was simply requesting more
sensitive information than the previous year, the administration claimed a
record number of "national security" exemptions. A record number of times
the administration also withheld information and cited a "deliberative
process" exemption, claiming it dealt with "decision-making behind the
scenes" so could not be released.
"[T]he government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully
denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On
196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a
person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to
be unreasonable or improper," according to the AP.
Plus, "Journalists and others who need information quickly to report
breaking news fared worse than ever last year."
.Blocking news organizations from urgently obtaining records about a
government scandal or crisis - such as the NSA's phone-records collection,
Boston bombings, trouble with its health care website, the deadly shootings
at the Washington Navy Yard or the attack on the diplomatic mission in
Benghazi - can delay uncovering significant developments until after
decisions are made and the public's interest has waned.
A request AP submitted for information on "contracts with public relations
companies to promote Obama's health care law" has been pending for over an
year. The AP has also been waiting for over ten months to receive emails
"between the IRS and outside Democratic super PACs about Tea Party groups."
Agencies are taking longer to respond to requests too. The AP noted, "The
Pentagon reported at least two requests still pending after 10 years and the
CIA was still working on at least four requests from more than eight years
ago." (But, the White House, for some reason, claimed it was responding
"more quickly" to FOIA requests. AP mentioned the White House did not
elaborate on how it arrived at this conclusion.)
Some of the more stunning episodes in the administration's efforts to be the
"most transparent"-which in effect is more secretive-administration in
history include conduct in the midst of disclosures from former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been fighting the administration for the
release of information that would detail secret legal interpretations of a
section of the PATRIOT Act. Once Snowden began to reveal details related to
what the administration had kept secret, Director for National Intelligence
James Clapper had the agency put up an "IC on the Record" Tumblr where
documents could be posted. The administration disingenuously made it seem
like it was voluntarily posting the documents, however, after Snowden's
disclosures began, a court ordered the administration to begin declassifying
documents that EFF had requested.
The Justice Department fought the release of a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court opinion, which underpinned the PRISM program that Snowden
revealed.
This year, in January, a case brought by EFF ended with a federal appeals
court in Washington, DC, ruling that the Justice Department could keep
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions secret. EFF had sought the release of
an opinion because it "purportedly allows the FBI to access the private call
records of phone company subscribers without providing any legal process."
The New York Times reacted, "The office's advice often serves as the final
word on what the executive branch may legally do, and those who follow that
advice are virtually assured that they will not face prosecution."
Secret legal opinions have often been drafted to authorize illegal activity,
such as torture, warrantless wiretapping and the killing of American
citizens with drones. The Obama administration has succeeded in keeping
legal opinions secret-essentially expanding a growing body of secret law
(that was much growing even more vast before Snowden blew the whistle on top
secret surveillance by the NSA).
However, the department did lose a lawsuit filed by Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A federal appeals court
ruled the department had tried to pervert freedom of information law with
its preferred legal interpretation that government agencies were only
required to communicate a "determination" on whether they would comply
within 20 working days.
By law, as the court ruling described, "A FOIA requester must exhaust
administrative appeal remedies before seeking judicial redress. But if an
agency does not adhere to certain statutory timelines in responding to a
FOIA request, the requester is deemed by statute to have fulfilled the
exhaustion requirement." That means the requester can appeal or sue the
agency for the release of documents.
The administration effectively would have created a Catch-22 that further
limited citizens' ability to challenge government when agencies refused to
release information.
The AP reported in June of last year, "The nation's top special operations
commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin
Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to
the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made
public." This clearly appears to be a circumvention of freedom of
information law.
The administration also refused requests for photos of bin Laden possibly
because, according to a member of SEAL Team Six who was part of the raid,
"Operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition
into Bin Laden's body," and, "When all was said and done, UBL had over a
hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate."
The release of White House visitor logs was fought by the Obama
administration, and the administration won in an appeals court last August.
According to the National Security Archive, "Nearly half (50 out of 101) of
all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act
regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more
agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President
Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a 'presumption of
disclosure.'"
The administration seems to expend resources and energy trying to develop
strategies to block the release of information to the public more than it
spends working to fulfill its pledge to be transparent.
It would not release GPS location tracking memos that would have showed how
the Justice Department interpreted the law in the aftermath of a major
Supreme Court decision. (A court ruled in favor of this secrecy last week.)
For years now, the ACLU has been fighting the government in court as it
maintains it should be able to conceal information on the "targeted
killings" of three US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his
16-year-old son, and Samir Khan.
The ACLU also has two other FOIA lawsuits the Obama administration has
fought-one for the "legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones"
and a lawsuit for information on a December 2009 missile strike the
administration launched on al Majalah in Yemen, which killed dozens of
civilians including 21 children.
As ProPublica outlined in November, even though Obama made some kind of a
promise that his administration would share more information on drones, the
groups considered to be "associated forces" of al Qaeda remain classified.
Whether any compensation has been paid to drone victims is unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out if strikes are, in fact, US drone strikes
because officials will not confirm them.
The administration has largely avoided confronting government secrecy,
especially the culture in Washington, which reinforces such secrecy. That
has made leaks of government information even more critical to enhancing the
public's understanding (but if Obama has his way, this flow of information
will be stopped entirely too).
Gannett News noted recently, "A study by researchers at Penn State
University found that government denials of the public's requests for
information increased during the first three years of the Obama
administration compared to the last three years of the George W. Bush
administration."
Each year the Obama administration has become progressively worse at
openness in government and yet it still promotes this illusion that it has
this sterling record when it comes to transparency.
In the CIA's fight against the Senate's torture report, the administration
has sought to invoke executive privilege to an alarming extent in order to
cover up abuses.
Not only is the Obama administration not the "most transparent
administration ever," it has become the inverse of the "most transparent
administration ever." It is now one of the most secretive administrations
ever, outpacing Bush in his commitment to keep government actions concealed
from the public.
C 2014 FireDogLake
/author/kevin-gosztola /author/kevin-gosztola
Kevin Gosztola is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose blog, The
Dissenter, is posted at FireDogLake.
more Kevin Gosztola
. /forward?path=node%2F103547
. /view/2014/03/17-9?print
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/17-9
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
Makes Mockery of Open Government
Unlike our last president, Barak Obama sounds very intelligent when he
speaks. Still, does it matter if the words are bumbled or if they are
brilliant? If they smell Brown, look brown, and taste brown, it's still
Bullshit!
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "Miriam Vieni" <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
To: "'Blind Democracy Discussion List'" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Monday, March 17, 2014 6:59 PM
Subject: 'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes
Mockery of Open Government
Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by FireDogLake
'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes Mockery
of Open Government
by Kevin Gosztola
Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, he pledged to have his
administration create an "unprecedented level of openness in government."
Then-chief of staff, Jack Lew, later contended the administration was the
"most transparent administration ever." At a rally in 2010, Obama told the
public, "We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest
transparency rules of any administration in history." But this slogan
suggesting the Obama administration is the "most transparent" ever has been
nothing but a marketing ploy, the product of an administration that
Advertising Age recognized as "marketer of the year" in 2008.
The Associated Press conducted its annual review of government data related
to the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the "government's efforts
to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since
President Barack Obama took office."
While the AP could not tell if the public was simply requesting more
sensitive information than the previous year, the administration claimed a
record number of "national security" exemptions. A record number of times
the administration also withheld information and cited a "deliberative
process" exemption, claiming it dealt with "decision-making behind the
scenes" so could not be released.
"[T]he government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully
denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On
196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a
person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to
be unreasonable or improper," according to the AP.
Plus, "Journalists and others who need information quickly to report
breaking news fared worse than ever last year."
.Blocking news organizations from urgently obtaining records about a
government scandal or crisis - such as the NSA's phone-records collection,
Boston bombings, trouble with its health care website, the deadly shootings
at the Washington Navy Yard or the attack on the diplomatic mission in
Benghazi - can delay uncovering significant developments until after
decisions are made and the public's interest has waned.
A request AP submitted for information on "contracts with public relations
companies to promote Obama's health care law" has been pending for over an
year. The AP has also been waiting for over ten months to receive emails
"between the IRS and outside Democratic super PACs about Tea Party groups."
Agencies are taking longer to respond to requests too. The AP noted, "The
Pentagon reported at least two requests still pending after 10 years and the
CIA was still working on at least four requests from more than eight years
ago." (But, the White House, for some reason, claimed it was responding
"more quickly" to FOIA requests. AP mentioned the White House did not
elaborate on how it arrived at this conclusion.)
Some of the more stunning episodes in the administration's efforts to be the
"most transparent"-which in effect is more secretive-administration in
history include conduct in the midst of disclosures from former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been fighting the administration for the
release of information that would detail secret legal interpretations of a
section of the PATRIOT Act. Once Snowden began to reveal details related to
what the administration had kept secret, Director for National Intelligence
James Clapper had the agency put up an "IC on the Record" Tumblr where
documents could be posted. The administration disingenuously made it seem
like it was voluntarily posting the documents, however, after Snowden's
disclosures began, a court ordered the administration to begin declassifying
documents that EFF had requested.
The Justice Department fought the release of a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court opinion, which underpinned the PRISM program that Snowden
revealed.
This year, in January, a case brought by EFF ended with a federal appeals
court in Washington, DC, ruling that the Justice Department could keep
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions secret. EFF had sought the release of
an opinion because it "purportedly allows the FBI to access the private call
records of phone company subscribers without providing any legal process."
The New York Times reacted, "The office's advice often serves as the final
word on what the executive branch may legally do, and those who follow that
advice are virtually assured that they will not face prosecution."
Secret legal opinions have often been drafted to authorize illegal activity,
such as torture, warrantless wiretapping and the killing of American
citizens with drones. The Obama administration has succeeded in keeping
legal opinions secret-essentially expanding a growing body of secret law
(that was much growing even more vast before Snowden blew the whistle on top
secret surveillance by the NSA).
However, the department did lose a lawsuit filed by Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A federal appeals court
ruled the department had tried to pervert freedom of information law with
its preferred legal interpretation that government agencies were only
required to communicate a "determination" on whether they would comply
within 20 working days.
By law, as the court ruling described, "A FOIA requester must exhaust
administrative appeal remedies before seeking judicial redress. But if an
agency does not adhere to certain statutory timelines in responding to a
FOIA request, the requester is deemed by statute to have fulfilled the
exhaustion requirement." That means the requester can appeal or sue the
agency for the release of documents.
The administration effectively would have created a Catch-22 that further
limited citizens' ability to challenge government when agencies refused to
release information.
The AP reported in June of last year, "The nation's top special operations
commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin
Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to
the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made
public." This clearly appears to be a circumvention of freedom of
information law.
The administration also refused requests for photos of bin Laden possibly
because, according to a member of SEAL Team Six who was part of the raid,
"Operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition
into Bin Laden's body," and, "When all was said and done, UBL had over a
hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate."
The release of White House visitor logs was fought by the Obama
administration, and the administration won in an appeals court last August.
According to the National Security Archive, "Nearly half (50 out of 101) of
all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act
regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more
agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President
Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a 'presumption of
disclosure.'"
The administration seems to expend resources and energy trying to develop
strategies to block the release of information to the public more than it
spends working to fulfill its pledge to be transparent.
It would not release GPS location tracking memos that would have showed how
the Justice Department interpreted the law in the aftermath of a major
Supreme Court decision. (A court ruled in favor of this secrecy last week.)
For years now, the ACLU has been fighting the government in court as it
maintains it should be able to conceal information on the "targeted
killings" of three US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his
16-year-old son, and Samir Khan.
The ACLU also has two other FOIA lawsuits the Obama administration has
fought-one for the "legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones"
and a lawsuit for information on a December 2009 missile strike the
administration launched on al Majalah in Yemen, which killed dozens of
civilians including 21 children.
As ProPublica outlined in November, even though Obama made some kind of a
promise that his administration would share more information on drones, the
groups considered to be "associated forces" of al Qaeda remain classified.
Whether any compensation has been paid to drone victims is unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out if strikes are, in fact, US drone strikes
because officials will not confirm them.
The administration has largely avoided confronting government secrecy,
especially the culture in Washington, which reinforces such secrecy. That
has made leaks of government information even more critical to enhancing the
public's understanding (but if Obama has his way, this flow of information
will be stopped entirely too).
Gannett News noted recently, "A study by researchers at Penn State
University found that government denials of the public's requests for
information increased during the first three years of the Obama
administration compared to the last three years of the George W. Bush
administration."
Each year the Obama administration has become progressively worse at
openness in government and yet it still promotes this illusion that it has
this sterling record when it comes to transparency.
In the CIA's fight against the Senate's torture report, the administration
has sought to invoke executive privilege to an alarming extent in order to
cover up abuses.
Not only is the Obama administration not the "most transparent
administration ever," it has become the inverse of the "most transparent
administration ever." It is now one of the most secretive administrations
ever, outpacing Bush in his commitment to keep government actions concealed
from the public.
C 2014 FireDogLake
Kevin Gosztola is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose blog, The
Dissenter, is posted at FireDogLake.
more Kevin Gosztola
. Share
Twitter Facebook Digg Google Google Buzz
StumbleUpon Delicous Newsvine Yahoo
More...
________________________________________
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/17-9
Return
. /forward?path=node%2F103547
. /view/2014/03/17-9?print
. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Published on Monday, March 17, 2014 by FireDogLake
'Most Transparent Administration EverT'-Obama Administration Makes Mockery
of Open Government
by Kevin Gosztola
Days after President Barack Obama's inauguration, he pledged to have his
administration create an "unprecedented level of openness in government."
Then-chief of staff, Jack Lew, later contended the administration was the
"most transparent administration ever." At a rally in 2010, Obama told the
public, "We have put in place the toughest ethics laws and toughest
transparency rules of any administration in history." But this slogan
suggesting the Obama administration is the "most transparent" ever has been
nothing but a marketing ploy, the product of an administration that
Advertising Age recognized as "marketer of the year" in 2008.
The Associated Press conducted its annual review of government data related
to the Freedom of Information Act. It found that the "government's efforts
to be more open about its activities last year were their worst since
President Barack Obama took office."
While the AP could not tell if the public was simply requesting more
sensitive information than the previous year, the administration claimed a
record number of "national security" exemptions. A record number of times
the administration also withheld information and cited a "deliberative
process" exemption, claiming it dealt with "decision-making behind the
scenes" so could not be released.
"[T]he government more than ever censored materials it turned over or fully
denied access to them, in 244,675 cases or 36 percent of all requests. On
196,034 other occasions, the government said it couldn't find records, a
person refused to pay for copies or the government determined the request to
be unreasonable or improper," according to the AP.
Plus, "Journalists and others who need information quickly to report
breaking news fared worse than ever last year."
.Blocking news organizations from urgently obtaining records about a
government scandal or crisis - such as the NSA's phone-records collection,
Boston bombings, trouble with its health care website, the deadly shootings
at the Washington Navy Yard or the attack on the diplomatic mission in
Benghazi - can delay uncovering significant developments until after
decisions are made and the public's interest has waned.
A request AP submitted for information on "contracts with public relations
companies to promote Obama's health care law" has been pending for over an
year. The AP has also been waiting for over ten months to receive emails
"between the IRS and outside Democratic super PACs about Tea Party groups."
Agencies are taking longer to respond to requests too. The AP noted, "The
Pentagon reported at least two requests still pending after 10 years and the
CIA was still working on at least four requests from more than eight years
ago." (But, the White House, for some reason, claimed it was responding
"more quickly" to FOIA requests. AP mentioned the White House did not
elaborate on how it arrived at this conclusion.)
Some of the more stunning episodes in the administration's efforts to be the
"most transparent"-which in effect is more secretive-administration in
history include conduct in the midst of disclosures from former National
Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) had been fighting the administration for the
release of information that would detail secret legal interpretations of a
section of the PATRIOT Act. Once Snowden began to reveal details related to
what the administration had kept secret, Director for National Intelligence
James Clapper had the agency put up an "IC on the Record" Tumblr where
documents could be posted. The administration disingenuously made it seem
like it was voluntarily posting the documents, however, after Snowden's
disclosures began, a court ordered the administration to begin declassifying
documents that EFF had requested.
The Justice Department fought the release of a Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court opinion, which underpinned the PRISM program that Snowden
revealed.
This year, in January, a case brought by EFF ended with a federal appeals
court in Washington, DC, ruling that the Justice Department could keep
Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions secret. EFF had sought the release of
an opinion because it "purportedly allows the FBI to access the private call
records of phone company subscribers without providing any legal process."
The New York Times reacted, "The office's advice often serves as the final
word on what the executive branch may legally do, and those who follow that
advice are virtually assured that they will not face prosecution."
Secret legal opinions have often been drafted to authorize illegal activity,
such as torture, warrantless wiretapping and the killing of American
citizens with drones. The Obama administration has succeeded in keeping
legal opinions secret-essentially expanding a growing body of secret law
(that was much growing even more vast before Snowden blew the whistle on top
secret surveillance by the NSA).
However, the department did lose a lawsuit filed by Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). A federal appeals court
ruled the department had tried to pervert freedom of information law with
its preferred legal interpretation that government agencies were only
required to communicate a "determination" on whether they would comply
within 20 working days.
By law, as the court ruling described, "A FOIA requester must exhaust
administrative appeal remedies before seeking judicial redress. But if an
agency does not adhere to certain statutory timelines in responding to a
FOIA request, the requester is deemed by statute to have fulfilled the
exhaustion requirement." That means the requester can appeal or sue the
agency for the release of documents.
The administration effectively would have created a Catch-22 that further
limited citizens' ability to challenge government when agencies refused to
release information.
The AP reported in June of last year, "The nation's top special operations
commander ordered military files about the Navy SEAL raid on Osama bin
Laden's hideout to be purged from Defense Department computers and sent to
the CIA, where they could be more easily shielded from ever being made
public." This clearly appears to be a circumvention of freedom of
information law.
The administration also refused requests for photos of bin Laden possibly
because, according to a member of SEAL Team Six who was part of the raid,
"Operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition
into Bin Laden's body," and, "When all was said and done, UBL had over a
hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate."
The release of White House visitor logs was fought by the Obama
administration, and the administration won in an appeals court last August.
According to the National Security Archive, "Nearly half (50 out of 101) of
all federal agencies have still not updated their Freedom of Information Act
regulations to comply with Congress's 2007 FOIA amendments, and even more
agencies (55 of 101) have FOIA regulations that predate and ignore President
Obama's and Attorney General Holder's 2009 guidance for a 'presumption of
disclosure.'"
The administration seems to expend resources and energy trying to develop
strategies to block the release of information to the public more than it
spends working to fulfill its pledge to be transparent.
It would not release GPS location tracking memos that would have showed how
the Justice Department interpreted the law in the aftermath of a major
Supreme Court decision. (A court ruled in favor of this secrecy last week.)
For years now, the ACLU has been fighting the government in court as it
maintains it should be able to conceal information on the "targeted
killings" of three US citizens: Anwar al-Awlaki, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, his
16-year-old son, and Samir Khan.
The ACLU also has two other FOIA lawsuits the Obama administration has
fought-one for the "legal and factual basis for its use of predator drones"
and a lawsuit for information on a December 2009 missile strike the
administration launched on al Majalah in Yemen, which killed dozens of
civilians including 21 children.
As ProPublica outlined in November, even though Obama made some kind of a
promise that his administration would share more information on drones, the
groups considered to be "associated forces" of al Qaeda remain classified.
Whether any compensation has been paid to drone victims is unknown.
Sometimes it is hard to figure out if strikes are, in fact, US drone strikes
because officials will not confirm them.
The administration has largely avoided confronting government secrecy,
especially the culture in Washington, which reinforces such secrecy. That
has made leaks of government information even more critical to enhancing the
public's understanding (but if Obama has his way, this flow of information
will be stopped entirely too).
Gannett News noted recently, "A study by researchers at Penn State
University found that government denials of the public's requests for
information increased during the first three years of the Obama
administration compared to the last three years of the George W. Bush
administration."
Each year the Obama administration has become progressively worse at
openness in government and yet it still promotes this illusion that it has
this sterling record when it comes to transparency.
In the CIA's fight against the Senate's torture report, the administration
has sought to invoke executive privilege to an alarming extent in order to
cover up abuses.
Not only is the Obama administration not the "most transparent
administration ever," it has become the inverse of the "most transparent
administration ever." It is now one of the most secretive administrations
ever, outpacing Bush in his commitment to keep government actions concealed
from the public.
C 2014 FireDogLake
/author/kevin-gosztola /author/kevin-gosztola
Kevin Gosztola is a writer and documentary filmmaker whose blog, The
Dissenter, is posted at FireDogLake.
more Kevin Gosztola
. /forward?path=node%2F103547
. /view/2014/03/17-9?print
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
Source URL: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/03/17-9
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Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
Subject: Re: Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
So why don't we get "paid what you're worth" out of the way? No more pay.
No more raises. No bonuses. No co-payments for medical assistance.
Instead, we set about providing decent housing, education, food, health and
other services such as police and fire protection.
Let's say that you are an auto worker. You are married with 2.4 children, a
dog, a cat and a parrot.
You select a home from those homes within easy reach of your place of work,
and you move your family in. Working, you are allowed to pick up food and
household supplies from the nearby All Purpose Store.
Of course folks are not going to buy in on such a plan. How can we expect
people to work extra hard if they can do the bare minimum and live just as
well?
How can a person show off their cleverness if they can't move into a gated
community and drive a flashy car and float a small yacht? And wear diamonds
the size of baseballs to set off their mink coats?
Well, maybe we have been so sold on what is and is not important in life
that we will never get things right. I guess there's no pleasure in
thinking of the day when every single man, woman and child live in comfort
and security. I guess that's not a worthy enough goal for this species to
strive for.
Well, don't get all bent out of shape when someone drills a hole in your
yard and starts fracking. After all, they want to get what's coming to
them.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "S. Kashdan" <skashdan@scn.org>
To: "Blind Democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:06 AM
Subject: Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
By Robert Reich [2]
RobertReich.org [1], March 17, 2014 |
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/why-paid-what-youre-worth-toxic-myth
It's often assumed that people are paid what they're worth. According to
this logic, minimum wage workers aren't worth more than the $7.25 an hour
they now receive. If they were worth more, they'd earn more. Any attempt to
force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs.
According to this same logic, CEOs of big companies are worth their giant
compensation packages, now averaging 300 times pay of the typical American
worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn't be paid this much. Any
attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take
some other form.
"Paid-what-you're-worth" is a dangerous myth.
Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America,
the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today's dollars. Today,
America's largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns
$8.80 an hour.
Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four
times what today's typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that
GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn't much
better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn't graduated
from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today's
Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets--mobile inventory controls,
instant checkout devices, retail search engines--making him or her quite
productive.
The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union
behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers
to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because
more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the
bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of
non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they'd be unionized if
they didn't come close to matching the union contracts.
Today's Walmart workers don't have a union to negotiate a better deal. They're
on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today's private-sector
workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don't have to
match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive
disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.
By the same token, today's CEOs don't rake in 300 times the pay of average
workers because they're "worth" it. They get these humongous pay packages
because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide
executive pay. Or their boards don't want to be seen by investors as having
hired a "second-string" CEO who's paid less than the CEOs of their major
competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.
If you still believe people are paid what they're worth, take a look at Wall
Street bonuses. Last year's average bonus was up 15 percent over the year
before, to more than $164,000. It was the largest average Wall Street bonus
since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, according
to [3]New York's state comptroller. Remember, we're talking bonuses, above
and beyond salaries.
All told, the Street paid out a whopping $26.7 billion in bonuses last year.
Are Wall Street bankers really worth it? Not if you figure in the hidden
subsidy flowing to the big Wall Street banks that ever since the bailout of
2008 have been considered too big to fail.
People who park their savings in these banks accept a lower interest rate on
deposits or loans than they require from America's smaller banks. That's
because smaller banks are riskier places to park money. Unlike the big
banks, the smaller ones won't be bailed out if they get into trouble.
This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street banks a competitive advantage over the
smaller banks, which means Wall Street makes more money. And as their
profits grow, the big banks keep getting bigger.
How large is this hidden subsidy? Two researchers, Kenichi Ueda of the
International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of
Mainz, have calculated [4] it's about eight tenths of a percentage point.
This may not sound like much but multiply it by the total amount of money
parked in the ten biggest Wall Street banks and you get a huge
amount--roughly $83 billion [5] a year.
Recall that the Street paid out $26.7 billion in bonuses last year. You don't
have to be a rocket scientist or even a Wall Street banker to see that the
hidden subsidy the Wall Street banks enjoy because they're too big to fail
is about three times what Wall Street paid out in bonuses.
Without the subsidy, no bonus pool.
By the way, the lion's share of that subsidy ($64 billion a year) goes to
the top five banks--JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. and
Goldman Sachs. This amount just about equals these banks' typical annual
profits. In other words, take away the subsidy and not only does the bonus
pool disappear, but so do all the profits.
The reason Wall Street bankers got fat paychecks plus a total of $26.7
billion in bonuses last year wasn't because they worked so much harder or
were so much more clever or insightful than most other Americans. They
cleaned up because they happen to work in institutions--big Wall Street
banks--that hold a privileged place in the American political economy.
And why, exactly, do these institutions continue to have such privileges?
Why hasn't Congress used the antitrust laws to cut them down to size so they're
not too big to fail, or at least taxed away their hidden subsidy (which,
after all, results from their taxpayer-financed bailout)?
Perhaps it's because Wall Street also accounts for a large proportion of
campaign donations to major candidates for Congress and the presidency of
both parties.
America's low-wage workers don't have privileged positions. They work very
hard--many holding down two or more jobs. But they can't afford to make
major campaign contributions and they have no political clout.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies [6], the $26.7 billion of
bonuses Wall Street banks paid out last year would be enough to more than
double the pay of every one of America's 1,085,000 full-time minimum wage
workers.
The remainder of the $83 billion of hidden subsidy going to those same banks
would almost be enough to double what the government now provides low-wage
workers in the form of wage subsidies under the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But I don't expect Congress to make these sorts of adjustments any time
soon.
The "paid-what-your-worth" argument is fundamentally misleading because it
ignores power, overlooks institutions, and disregards politics. As such, it
lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing whatever should be done to
change what people are paid, because nothing can be done.
Don't buy it.
See more stories tagged with:
paid-what-you're-worth [7],
myth [8],
wage parity [9],
wall street bonuses [10]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-paid-what-youre-worth-toxic-myth
Links:
[1] http://robertreich.org/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-reich-0
[3]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ny-comptroller-average-wall-st-bonus-over-164k/2014/03/12/3b1c7f8a-a9e7-11e3-8a7b-c1c684e2671f_story.html
[4] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12128.pdf
[5]
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-02-20/why-should-taxpayers-give-big-banks-83-billion-a-year-
[6] http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/wall_street_bonuses_and_the_minimum_wage
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/paid-what-youre-worth-0
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/myth
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wage-parity
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wall-street-bonuses-0
[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
_______________________________________________
Blind-Democracy mailing list
Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
http://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
So why don't we get "paid what you're worth" out of the way? No more pay.
No more raises. No bonuses. No co-payments for medical assistance.
Instead, we set about providing decent housing, education, food, health and
other services such as police and fire protection.
Let's say that you are an auto worker. You are married with 2.4 children, a
dog, a cat and a parrot.
You select a home from those homes within easy reach of your place of work,
and you move your family in. Working, you are allowed to pick up food and
household supplies from the nearby All Purpose Store.
Of course folks are not going to buy in on such a plan. How can we expect
people to work extra hard if they can do the bare minimum and live just as
well?
How can a person show off their cleverness if they can't move into a gated
community and drive a flashy car and float a small yacht? And wear diamonds
the size of baseballs to set off their mink coats?
Well, maybe we have been so sold on what is and is not important in life
that we will never get things right. I guess there's no pleasure in
thinking of the day when every single man, woman and child live in comfort
and security. I guess that's not a worthy enough goal for this species to
strive for.
Well, don't get all bent out of shape when someone drills a hole in your
yard and starts fracking. After all, they want to get what's coming to
them.
Carl Jarvis
----- Original Message -----
From: "S. Kashdan" <skashdan@scn.org>
To: "Blind Democracy List" <blind-democracy@octothorp.org>
Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2014 9:06 AM
Subject: Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
Why 'Paid-What-You're-Worth' Is a Toxic Myth
By Robert Reich [2]
RobertReich.org [1], March 17, 2014 |
http://www.alternet.org/print/news-amp-politics/why-paid-what-youre-worth-toxic-myth
It's often assumed that people are paid what they're worth. According to
this logic, minimum wage workers aren't worth more than the $7.25 an hour
they now receive. If they were worth more, they'd earn more. Any attempt to
force employers to pay them more will only kill jobs.
According to this same logic, CEOs of big companies are worth their giant
compensation packages, now averaging 300 times pay of the typical American
worker. They must be worth it or they wouldn't be paid this much. Any
attempt to limit their pay is fruitless because their pay will only take
some other form.
"Paid-what-you're-worth" is a dangerous myth.
Fifty years ago, when General Motors was the largest employer in America,
the typical GM worker got paid $35 an hour in today's dollars. Today,
America's largest employer is Walmart, and the typical Walmart workers earns
$8.80 an hour.
Does this mean the typical GM employee a half-century ago was worth four
times what today's typical Walmart employee is worth? Not at all. Yes, that
GM worker helped produce cars rather than retail sales. But he wasn't much
better educated or even that much more productive. He often hadn't graduated
from high school. And he worked on a slow-moving assembly line. Today's
Walmart worker is surrounded by digital gadgets--mobile inventory controls,
instant checkout devices, retail search engines--making him or her quite
productive.
The real difference is the GM worker a half-century ago had a strong union
behind him that summoned the collective bargaining power of all autoworkers
to get a substantial share of company revenues for its members. And because
more than a third of workers across America belonged to a labor union, the
bargains those unions struck with employers raised the wages and benefits of
non-unionized workers as well. Non-union firms knew they'd be unionized if
they didn't come close to matching the union contracts.
Today's Walmart workers don't have a union to negotiate a better deal. They're
on their own. And because fewer than 7 percent of today's private-sector
workers are unionized, non-union employers across America don't have to
match union contracts. This puts unionized firms at a competitive
disadvantage. The result has been a race to the bottom.
By the same token, today's CEOs don't rake in 300 times the pay of average
workers because they're "worth" it. They get these humongous pay packages
because they appoint the compensation committees on their boards that decide
executive pay. Or their boards don't want to be seen by investors as having
hired a "second-string" CEO who's paid less than the CEOs of their major
competitors. Either way, the result has been a race to the top.
If you still believe people are paid what they're worth, take a look at Wall
Street bonuses. Last year's average bonus was up 15 percent over the year
before, to more than $164,000. It was the largest average Wall Street bonus
since the 2008 financial crisis and the third highest on record, according
to [3]New York's state comptroller. Remember, we're talking bonuses, above
and beyond salaries.
All told, the Street paid out a whopping $26.7 billion in bonuses last year.
Are Wall Street bankers really worth it? Not if you figure in the hidden
subsidy flowing to the big Wall Street banks that ever since the bailout of
2008 have been considered too big to fail.
People who park their savings in these banks accept a lower interest rate on
deposits or loans than they require from America's smaller banks. That's
because smaller banks are riskier places to park money. Unlike the big
banks, the smaller ones won't be bailed out if they get into trouble.
This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street banks a competitive advantage over the
smaller banks, which means Wall Street makes more money. And as their
profits grow, the big banks keep getting bigger.
How large is this hidden subsidy? Two researchers, Kenichi Ueda of the
International Monetary Fund and Beatrice Weder di Mauro of the University of
Mainz, have calculated [4] it's about eight tenths of a percentage point.
This may not sound like much but multiply it by the total amount of money
parked in the ten biggest Wall Street banks and you get a huge
amount--roughly $83 billion [5] a year.
Recall that the Street paid out $26.7 billion in bonuses last year. You don't
have to be a rocket scientist or even a Wall Street banker to see that the
hidden subsidy the Wall Street banks enjoy because they're too big to fail
is about three times what Wall Street paid out in bonuses.
Without the subsidy, no bonus pool.
By the way, the lion's share of that subsidy ($64 billion a year) goes to
the top five banks--JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo. and
Goldman Sachs. This amount just about equals these banks' typical annual
profits. In other words, take away the subsidy and not only does the bonus
pool disappear, but so do all the profits.
The reason Wall Street bankers got fat paychecks plus a total of $26.7
billion in bonuses last year wasn't because they worked so much harder or
were so much more clever or insightful than most other Americans. They
cleaned up because they happen to work in institutions--big Wall Street
banks--that hold a privileged place in the American political economy.
And why, exactly, do these institutions continue to have such privileges?
Why hasn't Congress used the antitrust laws to cut them down to size so they're
not too big to fail, or at least taxed away their hidden subsidy (which,
after all, results from their taxpayer-financed bailout)?
Perhaps it's because Wall Street also accounts for a large proportion of
campaign donations to major candidates for Congress and the presidency of
both parties.
America's low-wage workers don't have privileged positions. They work very
hard--many holding down two or more jobs. But they can't afford to make
major campaign contributions and they have no political clout.
According to the Institute for Policy Studies [6], the $26.7 billion of
bonuses Wall Street banks paid out last year would be enough to more than
double the pay of every one of America's 1,085,000 full-time minimum wage
workers.
The remainder of the $83 billion of hidden subsidy going to those same banks
would almost be enough to double what the government now provides low-wage
workers in the form of wage subsidies under the Earned Income Tax Credit.
But I don't expect Congress to make these sorts of adjustments any time
soon.
The "paid-what-your-worth" argument is fundamentally misleading because it
ignores power, overlooks institutions, and disregards politics. As such, it
lures the unsuspecting into thinking nothing whatever should be done to
change what people are paid, because nothing can be done.
Don't buy it.
See more stories tagged with:
paid-what-you're-worth [7],
myth [8],
wage parity [9],
wall street bonuses [10]
Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-paid-what-youre-worth-toxic-myth
Links:
[1] http://robertreich.org/
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/robert-reich-0
[3]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/ny-comptroller-average-wall-st-bonus-over-164k/2014/03/12/3b1c7f8a-a9e7-11e3-8a7b-c1c684e2671f_story.html
[4] http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2012/wp12128.pdf
[5]
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-02-20/why-should-taxpayers-give-big-banks-83-billion-a-year-
[6] http://www.ips-dc.org/reports/wall_street_bonuses_and_the_minimum_wage
[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/paid-what-youre-worth-0
[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/myth
[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wage-parity
[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/wall-street-bonuses-0
[11] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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