Friday, December 23, 2011
Feds Protecting The Nuclear Industry From Bad PR?
DailyKos: Nuclear Regulatory Meltdown: Four NRC Commisioners Conspire with Republicans in Coup Attempt
"Four commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission attempted to delay the Commission's response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear emergency, to cover up the severity of the incident and to weaken nuclear safety regulation. The four commissioners, conspiring with House Republican Daryl Issa, are attempting a coup against Chairman Jazcko and a mutiny against President Obama. They are attempting to force out the Chairman, to weaken nuclear safety enforcement and to restore the Yucca Mt. high level waste repository that President Obama gave an order to terminate. House Republicans, under pressure from the nuclear power industry, have been attempting to force the President to continue development of Yucca Mountain. The coup leader is Commissioner Bill Magwood who has worked as a consultant to TEPCO, the owner of the failed Fukushima Daiichi reactors.
On December 9 Nuclear Watchdog, Dem. Congressman Markey, released the stunning report, 'Regulatory Meltdown How Four Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners Conspired to Weaken and Delay Nuclear Safety in the Wake of Fukushima'..."
The High Cost of The Military Industrial Complex
I'd like to have the name of every Congress member, contractors, consultants, lobbyists who pushed for this expensive, limited-use project...
David Axe: Buyer’s Remorse: How Much Has the F-22 Really Cost?
"The 196th and final F-22 Raptor has rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s factory in Marietta, Georgia. That means yesterday marked an end to more than 14 years of production for what’s widely considered the most fearsome jet fighter in history. And also one of the costliest.
So what’s the cost? As little as $137 million per jet and as much as $678 million, depending on how and what you count. The thing is, the best way of calculating the F-22′s cost may be the most abstract. But any way you crunch the numbers, the world’s best dogfighter has also been one of the most expensive operational warplanes ever..."
OWS and The CIA FOIA Heisman:
JusticeOnline: Occupy Crackdown: CIA plays new version of "I Won't Tell You."
"The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is refusing to process a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that would reveal what role, if any, the agency has played in law enforcement’s coordinated, nationwide campaign to shut down and evict Occupy movement encampments in cities throughout the country.
The FOIA demand for records was filed by the Washington D.C.-based civil rights legal organization, the Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJF).
The language used by the agency to announce its refusal to process the FOIA request concerning its role in the crackdown on the Occupy movement is 'a classic case of CIA-double speak,' according to the attorneys at the PCJF.
The CIA is not specifically denying that it has records and documents that would reveal its role in the coordinated crackdown that evicted the encampments in major cities within a short period of time. Rather, the agency asserts that it won’t look for such records and documents.
'The CIA is apparently asserting that because its involvement in law enforcement's crackdown of the Occupy movement would be barred by law, it is not possible for the CIA to conduct an effective search for information responsive to our inquiry into its role in the operation,' stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF. 'In other words,' she continued, 'because the actions would be illegal, they would also be off the books.'
Far from claiming it does not possess responsive records, the CIA stated in its letter to Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard that because such activities would be barred by law, 'our records systems are not configured in a way that would allow us to perform a search reasonably calculated to lead to responsive records. Therefore, we must decline to process your request.'
The PCJF has demanded that the CIA reconsider its request and is prepared to take legal action as necessary to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. This denial comes on the heels of a series of Associated Press articles revealing the CIA’s involvement with the NYPD..."
DailyKos: Nuclear Regulatory Meltdown: Four NRC Commisioners Conspire with Republicans in Coup Attempt
"Four commissioners of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission attempted to delay the Commission's response to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear emergency, to cover up the severity of the incident and to weaken nuclear safety regulation. The four commissioners, conspiring with House Republican Daryl Issa, are attempting a coup against Chairman Jazcko and a mutiny against President Obama. They are attempting to force out the Chairman, to weaken nuclear safety enforcement and to restore the Yucca Mt. high level waste repository that President Obama gave an order to terminate. House Republicans, under pressure from the nuclear power industry, have been attempting to force the President to continue development of Yucca Mountain. The coup leader is Commissioner Bill Magwood who has worked as a consultant to TEPCO, the owner of the failed Fukushima Daiichi reactors.
On December 9 Nuclear Watchdog, Dem. Congressman Markey, released the stunning report, 'Regulatory Meltdown How Four Nuclear Regulatory Commissioners Conspired to Weaken and Delay Nuclear Safety in the Wake of Fukushima'..."
The High Cost of The Military Industrial Complex
I'd like to have the name of every Congress member, contractors, consultants, lobbyists who pushed for this expensive, limited-use project...
David Axe: Buyer’s Remorse: How Much Has the F-22 Really Cost?
"The 196th and final F-22 Raptor has rolled out of Lockheed Martin’s factory in Marietta, Georgia. That means yesterday marked an end to more than 14 years of production for what’s widely considered the most fearsome jet fighter in history. And also one of the costliest.
So what’s the cost? As little as $137 million per jet and as much as $678 million, depending on how and what you count. The thing is, the best way of calculating the F-22′s cost may be the most abstract. But any way you crunch the numbers, the world’s best dogfighter has also been one of the most expensive operational warplanes ever..."
OWS and The CIA FOIA Heisman:
JusticeOnline: Occupy Crackdown: CIA plays new version of "I Won't Tell You."
"The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is refusing to process a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that would reveal what role, if any, the agency has played in law enforcement’s coordinated, nationwide campaign to shut down and evict Occupy movement encampments in cities throughout the country.
The FOIA demand for records was filed by the Washington D.C.-based civil rights legal organization, the Partnership for Civil Justice (PCJF).
The language used by the agency to announce its refusal to process the FOIA request concerning its role in the crackdown on the Occupy movement is 'a classic case of CIA-double speak,' according to the attorneys at the PCJF.
The CIA is not specifically denying that it has records and documents that would reveal its role in the coordinated crackdown that evicted the encampments in major cities within a short period of time. Rather, the agency asserts that it won’t look for such records and documents.
'The CIA is apparently asserting that because its involvement in law enforcement's crackdown of the Occupy movement would be barred by law, it is not possible for the CIA to conduct an effective search for information responsive to our inquiry into its role in the operation,' stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF. 'In other words,' she continued, 'because the actions would be illegal, they would also be off the books.'
Far from claiming it does not possess responsive records, the CIA stated in its letter to Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard that because such activities would be barred by law, 'our records systems are not configured in a way that would allow us to perform a search reasonably calculated to lead to responsive records. Therefore, we must decline to process your request.'
The PCJF has demanded that the CIA reconsider its request and is prepared to take legal action as necessary to force the agency to comply with its obligations under the Freedom of Information Act. This denial comes on the heels of a series of Associated Press articles revealing the CIA’s involvement with the NYPD..."
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Jobs & Taxing The Rich:
Business Insider: Finally, A Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create Jobs
"In the war of rhetoric that has developed in Washington as both sides blame each other for our economic mess, one argument has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact:
Rich people create jobs.
Specifically, entrepreneurs and investors, when incented by low taxes, build companies and create millions of jobs.
And these entrepreneurs and investors, therefore, the argument goes, can solve our nation's huge unemployment problem — if only we cut taxes and regulations so they can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.
In other words, by even considering raising taxes on 'the 1%,' we are considering destroying the very mechanism that makes our economy the strongest and biggest in the world: The incentive for entrepreneurs and investors to build companies in the hope of getting rich and, in the process, creating millions of jobs.
Now, there have long been many problems with this argument starting with
1. Taxes on rich people (capital gains and income) are, relative to history, low, so raising them would only begin to bring them back in line with prior prosperous periods, and
2. Dozens of rich entrepreneurs have already gone on record confirming that a modest hike in capital gains and income taxes would not have the slightest impact on their desire to create companies and jobs, given that tax rates are historically low.
So this argument, which many people regard as fact, is already flawed...
...The most important reason the theory that 'rich people create the jobs' is absurd, argues Nick Hanauer, the founder of online advertising company aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for $6.4 billion, is that rich people do not create jobs, even if they found and build companies that eventually employ thousands of people.
What creates the jobs, Hanauer astutely observes, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company's customers..."
The Banksters:
Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West
"Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other 'story' – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard 'experts' who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.
Let's kick off with the 'Arab Spring' – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have 'taken a leaf' out of the 'Arab spring' book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been 'inspired' by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against 'governments'. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of 'experts' from America's top universities and 'think tanks', who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine..."
Business Insider: Finally, A Rich American Destroys The Fiction That Rich People Create Jobs
"In the war of rhetoric that has developed in Washington as both sides blame each other for our economic mess, one argument has been repeated so often that many people now regard it as fact:
Rich people create jobs.
Specifically, entrepreneurs and investors, when incented by low taxes, build companies and create millions of jobs.
And these entrepreneurs and investors, therefore, the argument goes, can solve our nation's huge unemployment problem — if only we cut taxes and regulations so they can be incented to build more companies and create more jobs.
In other words, by even considering raising taxes on 'the 1%,' we are considering destroying the very mechanism that makes our economy the strongest and biggest in the world: The incentive for entrepreneurs and investors to build companies in the hope of getting rich and, in the process, creating millions of jobs.
Now, there have long been many problems with this argument starting with
1. Taxes on rich people (capital gains and income) are, relative to history, low, so raising them would only begin to bring them back in line with prior prosperous periods, and
2. Dozens of rich entrepreneurs have already gone on record confirming that a modest hike in capital gains and income taxes would not have the slightest impact on their desire to create companies and jobs, given that tax rates are historically low.
So this argument, which many people regard as fact, is already flawed...
...The most important reason the theory that 'rich people create the jobs' is absurd, argues Nick Hanauer, the founder of online advertising company aQuantive, which Microsoft bought for $6.4 billion, is that rich people do not create jobs, even if they found and build companies that eventually employ thousands of people.
What creates the jobs, Hanauer astutely observes, is a healthy economic ecosystem surrounding the company, which starts with the company's customers..."
The Banksters:
Robert Fisk: Bankers are the dictators of the West
"Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other 'story' – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so much garbage, so much utter drivel, as I have about the world financial crisis.
But I will not hold my fire. It seems to me that the reporting of the collapse of capitalism has reached a new low which even the Middle East cannot surpass for sheer unadulterated obedience to the very institutions and Harvard 'experts' who have helped to bring about the whole criminal disaster.
Let's kick off with the 'Arab Spring' – in itself a grotesque verbal distortion of the great Arab/Muslim awakening which is shaking the Middle East – and the trashy parallels with the social protests in Western capitals. We've been deluged with reports of how the poor or the disadvantaged in the West have 'taken a leaf' out of the 'Arab spring' book, how demonstrators in America, Canada, Britain, Spain and Greece have been 'inspired' by the huge demonstrations that brought down the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and – up to a point – Libya. But this is nonsense.
The real comparison, needless to say, has been dodged by Western reporters, so keen to extol the anti-dictator rebellions of the Arabs, so anxious to ignore protests against "democratic" Western governments, so desperate to disparage these demonstrations, to suggest that they are merely picking up on the latest fad in the Arab world. The truth is somewhat different. What drove the Arabs in their tens of thousands and then their millions on to the streets of Middle East capitals was a demand for dignity and a refusal to accept that the local family-ruled dictators actually owned their countries. The Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and the Gaddafis and the kings and emirs of the Gulf (and Jordan) and the Assads all believed that they had property rights to their entire nations. Egypt belonged to Mubarak Inc, Tunisia to Ben Ali Inc (and the Traboulsi family), Libya to Gaddafi Inc. And so on. The Arab martyrs against dictatorship died to prove that their countries belonged to their own people.
And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against 'governments'. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people's power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of 'experts' from America's top universities and 'think tanks', who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalisation rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.
The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people's wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine..."
Thursday, December 08, 2011
Excessive Force To Counter Non-Violent Protest:
Many, many of these reports show the police to be thugs. If one applies the comments of our President & Sec. of State on the free-speech rights of protesters in Egypt, Libya, or Algeria to Occupy Wall Street protests in OUR COUNTRY, our leaders sound like hypocrites. I'm sure they would say their comments are being 'unfairly taken out of context.'
Patrick Meighan: My Occupy LA Arrest
"My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom 'Family Guy', and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s 'Being Peace' when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted 'We Are Peaceful' and 'We Are Nonviolent' and 'Join Us,'...
...When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing..."
Many, many of these reports show the police to be thugs. If one applies the comments of our President & Sec. of State on the free-speech rights of protesters in Egypt, Libya, or Algeria to Occupy Wall Street protests in OUR COUNTRY, our leaders sound like hypocrites. I'm sure they would say their comments are being 'unfairly taken out of context.'
Patrick Meighan: My Occupy LA Arrest
"My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom 'Family Guy', and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s 'Being Peace' when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted 'We Are Peaceful' and 'We Are Nonviolent' and 'Join Us,'...
...When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really, really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out. One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing..."
