President Obama is now claiming the authority to detain people forever without due process - just like President Bush. The administration just announced that it plans to indefinitely detain 50 people that are "too dangerous to release," but who cannot be tried - either because the evidence against them was produced by "coercion" (ahem, "torture"), or because the evidence against them is wanting.
Few Americans object, and most cheer.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court decided, by a 5-4 majority, that corporations have the same right to freedom of speech as natural persons and, consequently, threw out all restrictions on corporate financing of issue ads advocating the election or defeat of particular candidates. Putting this in perspective, Exxon Mobile reported a $45 Billion dollar profit last year. The total amount of money spent on federal elections in 2008, including the presidential election, was $6 billion dollars. This means that if Exxon Mobile thought it was in their interest to elect politicians with a certain political tendency, they can now devote less than 15% of one year's profit to that project and spend more than all private contributions combined. And that is just one corporation! Walmart? AIG? What about all those American corporations that are owned by foreign companies?
Ho hum. What ever?
Harper's magazine reports that U.S. officials may have murdered 3 U.S. detainees and then had military officials, in coordination with the Justice Department, cover it up by claiming, implausibly, that these detainees had committed suicide.
You don't say. Oh well . . .
We discover that our Treasury Secretary, Timothy Giethner, when he was the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, secretly arranged to have AIG use over $60 billion dollars of tax payer supplied money to purchase toxic assets from Wall Street Banks, including his former firm, Goldman Sachs, at 100% of their investment value (at a time when nobody knew what their market value was). This amounted to a $60 billion dollar give away of tax dollars to the private shareholders of the Wall Street firms - the shareholders of other institutions benefited as well. Then, the New York Federal Reserve Bank, without Giethner's knowledge - yeah right - instructed AIG not to disclose these transactions on its required regulatory filings with the SEC. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York instructs a private company to break the law.
But, Giethner's words, "It had to be done." Okay, if you say so.
What is simply amazing to me is that all of these things have occurred/come to light in the last two weeks.
No response. American lost.
Joe H.
Posts
The Years Of Writing Dangerously
9 years ago
1 comment:
I don't think that everything is ho-hum. The great people of Massachusetts just elected their first Republican Senator in 20-30 years thereby killing the filibuster proof majority in the Senate, and by extension killing the deficit inducing, special interest laden Health Care Reform bill (and Cap and Trade for that matter). In fact, it was such an out cry from the people that the Democrats have now focused their attention on finding ways to actually reduce the debt.
America- Once was lost, now is found =)
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