Usa Thread

[Flashermac]

Taranto has a vaild point when he says both parties have been taken over by their extreme wings. Most people are somewhere in the middle, but their voices are seldom heard. I remember when there were moderate Democrats and moderate Republicans. Where did they go?

[unit731]

View the entire 1 hour documentary video.

It explains all.

Sad commentary on today's politics.

 

 

http://youtu.be/bor_rR9YANI

[Flashermac]

Al Gore: NSA Surveillance Violates The Constitution

 

 

Former Vice President Al Gore broke with many of his fellow Democrats Friday and said that the NSA surveillance programs violate the constitution.

 

"This in my view violates the constitution. The fourth amendment and the first amendment – and the fourth amendment language is crystal clear," he told The Guardian, which revealed the agency's phone surveillance and reported on its Internet data-mining. "It is not acceptable to have a secret interpretation of a law that goes far beyond any reasonable reading of either the law or the constitution and then classify as top secret what the actual law is."

 

"I quite understand the viewpoint that many have expressed that they are fine with it and they just want to be safe but that is not really the American way," he added.

 

Gore called "blanket" surveillance "obscenely outrageous" in a tweet on June 5. Nevertheless, he has mostly criticized Obama over climate change, an issue where the 2000 presidential nominee won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in 2007.

 

The revelations have scrambled traditional Democratic and Republican labels. A bill to require the Attorney General to declassify the court opinions used to justify the programs was introduced by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). Sen Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced Thursday that he planned to take legal action against the programs, after initially introducing his own legislation to prevent the government from collecting data on Americans.

 

On the other hand, both Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) have said that Edward Snowden, who admitted to leaking documents showing the existence of the programs to The Guardian, committed treason. Congressional leaders in both houses have called for him to be prosecuted, with Boehner going so far as to call Snowden a "traitor."

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/14/al-gore-nsa_n_3443646.html

[Flashermac]

CBS' Bob Schieffer Destroys Edward Snowden In 90 Seconds

 

 

CBS anchor Bob Schieffer on Sunday ripped Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old former National Security Agency contractor who was the source of a spring of leaks about the agency's surveillance methods.

 

Amid a debate over whether Snowden is a "hero" for exposing information about the scope of the NSA's surveillance methods, Schieffer said Snowden shouldn't be mentioned in the same conversation as other heroes who have exposed government wrongdoings.

 

"For one thing, I don't remember Martin Luther King, Jr., or Rosa Parks running off and hiding in China. The people who ran the civil-rights movement were willing to break the law and suffer the consequences," Schieffer said during a monologue on CBS' "Face the Nation."

 

"That's a little different than putting the nation's security at risk and running away."

 

Schieffer said he isn't sure whether the NSA is overreaching by gathering information from phone calls and electronic communications. But he said that the members of Congress that Americans elected should be held accountable.

 

"What I see in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us," Schieffer said. "I don't know what he is beyond that. But he is no hero. If he has a point — which I'm not sure he does — he would help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face the consequences."

 

 

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/bob-schieffer-edward-snowden-face-the-nation-2013-6?utm_source=Sinocism+Newsletter&utm_campaign=19adaa70c4-Sinocism06_18_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_171f237867-19adaa70c4-29601105

[unit731]

As I stated above. None of this is new.

Congress passes bills that most members don't even read.

 

What is new is the method that this guy used to state what is in these laws.

 

What is new is how easy it is for some/any employee of some private contractor can leak/steal such material/information.

[Flashermac]

<< Congress passes bills that most members don't even read. >>

 

 

And that is what I find hardest to believe. For the money they get paid, they should damn well find out what they are voting on.

[cavanami]

TWA Flight 800 Investigators Claim the Official Crash Story Is a Lie

 

http://news.yahoo.com/twa-flight-800-investigators-claim-official-crash-story-120157562.html

 

A new film claims the official government report on the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 is an elaborate fabrication, but the most shocking part of the story is that charges are being leveled by some of the very investigators who put the report together. Six experts who appear in the film were members of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation team that concluded the crash was an accident, but they now claim they were silenced by their superiors. The movies, "TWA Flight 800" will debut on EPIX TV next month, on the 17-year anniversary of the crash.

TWA Flight 800 was en route from JFK Airport in New York to Paris, France, when it exploded and crashed off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. From the very beginning, there were some who speculated that the plane was the victim of a terrorist attack, leading the FBI to conduct its own criminal investigation. Among the possibilities that were suggested as the cause were a bomb in the cargo hold, or an anti-aircraft missile. Several witnesses even claimed they saw an object or streak of light that looked liked a missile or rocket moving toward the plane before it exploded...

[Steve]

<< Congress passes bills that most members don't even read. >>

 

 

And that is what I find hardest to believe. For the money they get paid, they should damn well find out what they are voting on.

 

If there can be anything even worse than that is for many years now, certainly since the '80s and I'd guess prior, interest groups, from both sides of the aisle, write the bills to be introduce and provide the congresspersons via their top aides or directly the talking points to sell it if they expect to meet some opposition. During the days when they worked closer, House Representatives would do a quid pro quo with opposition members over bills. They all know they are bought by some group so I'll vote for yours if you vote for mine.

 

I recall specicifally an article in the '90s when I was very angry over the Financial Services Modernization Act that Congresspersons were excusing themselves to go into hallway to ask exactly what they should be saying. This act helped basically take the gloves off for the financial industry to do all kinds of mischief.

There is hardly a law that is not wholly or in part written by some interest group. This is BOTH sides of the aisle.

 

As for the NSA, etc. its clearly unconstitutional. The government is meetng some resistance about but not much. Not enough outrage. We are collectively sheep now. They can openly spy on us, detain us, pretty much do ANYTHING up to and including murder (drones) and we are all collectively complicit in our own decline. Domestic crime can now be labled terrorism and you are deemed an 'enemy combatant' which is code word for your rights and citizenship means absolutely nothing.

 

I'm speculating but had some of the groups from the '60s and '70s movements been around now they would be enemy combantants. Certainly the Black Panthers and other ultranationalistic Black groups and possibly the various hippy movement groups. Could MLK Jr and the civil rights movement be labled as such? The only clue I have as to how they would be portrayed today is the Occupy Wall Street movement. Whether you agree with them or not, they made it very clear and went to great lengths to make it peaceful. They attempted not to tolerate members who displayed violence. However, the police would incite them and arrest them for the most innocouos things and it happened in so many cities I'm hardpressed not to think it was by collective design.

 

The Tea Party has been investigated and targeted by the IRS. So we have both sides of the ideological divide.

 

Is the constitutional right to protest now pretty much illegal? Or at the very least does the government impede the right to collective protest via various methods (IRS, police harrassment, etc.)?

 

Yeah, I know, I sound like a nut. Maybe I am. But it has depressed me. The U.S. we read about in our civics and social studies book should be a history book now because it NO LONGER EXISTS.

 

Obama has quickened the pace of the civil liberty decline. Faster than Bush/Cheyney it seems if that's not crazy enough. It would have been as bad at the very best had McCain or Romney been elected and thats the sad thing. There is no choice other than bad and worse.

[Flashermac]

How American Society Unravelled After Greedy Elites Robbed the Country Blind

 

The Guardian / By George Packer

 

June 20, 2013

 

 

In or around 1978, America's character changed. For almost half a century, the United States had been a relatively egalitarian, secure, middle-class democracy, with structures in place that supported the aspirations of ordinary people. You might call it the period of the Roosevelt Republic. Wars, strikes, racial tensions and youth rebellion all roiled national life, but a basic deal among Americans still held, in belief if not always in fact: work hard, follow the rules, educate your children, and you will be rewarded, not just with a decent life and the prospect of a better one for your kids, but with recognition from society, a place at the table.

 

This unwritten contract came with a series of riders and clauses that left large numbers of Americans – black people and other minorities, women, gay people – out, or only halfway in. But the country had the tools to correct its own flaws, and it used them: healthy democratic institutions such as Congress, courts, churches, schools, news organisations, business-labour partnerships. The civil rights movement of the 1960s was a nonviolent mass uprising led by black Southerners, but it drew essential support from all of these institutions, which recognised the moral and legal justice of its claims, or, at the very least, the need for social peace. The Roosevelt Republic had plenty of injustice, but it also had the power of self-correction.

 

Americans were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic. But the institutions of American democracy, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel them to more useful ends. Human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did.

 

At the time, the late 1970s felt like shapeless, dreary, forgettable years. Jimmy Carter was in the White House, preaching austerity and public-spiritedness, and hardly anyone was listening. The hideous term "stagflation", which combined the normally opposed economic phenomena of stagnation and inflation, perfectly captured the doldrums of that moment. It is only with the hindsight of a full generation that we can see how many things were beginning to shift across the American landscape, sending the country spinning into a new era.

 

In Youngstown, Ohio, the steel mills that had been the city's foundation for a century closed, one after another, with breathtaking speed, taking 50,000 jobs from a small industrial river valley, leaving nothing to replace them. In Cupertino, California, the Apple Computer Company released the first popular personal computer, the Apple II. Across California, voters passed Proposition 13, launching a tax revolt that began the erosion of public funding for what had been the country's best school system. In Washington, corporations organised themselves into a powerful lobby that spent millions of dollars to defeat the kind of labour and consumer bills they had once accepted as part of the social contract. Newt Gingrich came to Congress as a conservative Republican with the singular ambition to tear it down and build his own and his party's power on the rubble. On Wall Street, Salomon Brothers pioneered a new financial product called mortgage-backed securities, and then became the first investment bank to go public.

 

The large currents of the past generation – deindustrialisation, the flattening of average wages, the financialisation of the economy, income inequality, the growth of information technology, the flood of money into Washington, the rise of the political right – all had their origins in the late 70s. The US became more entrepreneurial and less bureaucratic, more individualistic and less communitarian, more free and less equal, more tolerant and less fair. Banking and technology, concentrated on the coasts, turned into engines of wealth, replacing the world of stuff with the world of bits, but without creating broad prosperity, while the heartland hollowed out. The institutions that had been the foundation of middle-class democracy, from public schools and secure jobs to flourishing newspapers and functioning legislatures, were set on the course of a long decline. It as a period that I call the Unwinding.

 

In one view, the Unwinding is just a return to the normal state of American life. By this deterministic analysis, the US has always been a wide-open, free-wheeling country, with a high tolerance for big winners and big losers as the price of equal opportunity in a dynamic society. If the US brand of capitalism has rougher edges than that of other democracies, it is worth the trade-off for growth and mobility. There is nothing unusual about the six surviving heirs to the Walmart fortune possessing between them the same wealth as the bottom 42% of Americans – that's the country's default setting. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are the reincarnation of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, Steven Cohen is another JP Morgan, Jay-Z is Jay Gatsby.

 

The rules and regulations of the Roosevelt Republic were aberrations brought on by accidents of history – depression, world war, the cold war – that induced Americans to surrender a degree of freedom in exchange for security. There would have been no Glass-Steagall Act, separating commercial from investment banking, without the bank failures of 1933; no great middle-class boom if the US economy had not been the only one left standing after the second world war; no bargain between business, labour and government without a shared sense of national interest in the face of foreign enemies; no social solidarity without the door to immigrants remaining closed through the middle of the century.

 

Once American pre-eminence was challenged by international competitors, and the economy hit rough seas in the 70s, and the sense of existential threat from abroad subsided, the deal was off. Globalisation, technology and immigration hurried the Unwinding along, as inexorable as winds and tides. It is sentimental at best, if not ahistorical, to imagine that the social contract could ever have survived – like wanting to hang on to a world of nuclear families and manual typewriters.

 

This deterministic view is undeniable but incomplete. What it leaves out of the picture is human choice. A fuller explanation of the Unwinding takes into account these large historical influences, but also the way they were exploited by US elites – the leaders of the institutions that have fallen into disrepair. America's postwar responsibilities demanded co-operation between the two parties in Congress, and when the cold war waned, the co-operation was bound to diminish with it. But there was nothing historically determined about the poisonous atmosphere and demonising language that Gingrich and other conservative ideologues spread through US politics. These tactics served their narrow, short-term interests, and when the Gingrich revolution brought Republicans to power in Congress, the tactics were affirmed. Gingrich is now a has-been, but Washington today is as much his city as anyone's.

 

It was impossible for Youngstown's steel companies to withstand global competition and local disinvestment, but there was nothing inevitable about the aftermath – an unmanaged free-for-all in which unemployed workers were left to fend for themselves, while corporate raiders bought the idle hulks of the mills with debt in the form of junk bonds and stripped out the remaining value. It may have been inevitable that the constraints imposed on US banks by the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 would start to slip off in the era of global finance. But it was a political choice on the part of Congress and President Bill Clinton to deregulate Wall Street so thoroughly that nothing stood between the big banks and the destruction of the economy.

 

Much has been written about the effects of globalisation during the past generation. Much less has been said about the change in social norms that accompanied it. American elites took the vast transformation of the economy as a signal to rewrite the rules that used to govern their behaviour: a senator only resorting to the filibuster on rare occasions; a CEO limiting his salary to only 40 times what his average employees made instead of 800 times; a giant corporation paying its share of taxes instead of inventing creative ways to pay next to zero. There will always be isolated lawbreakers in high places; what destroys morale below is the systematic corner-cutting, the rule-bending, the self-dealing.

 

Earlier this year, Al Gore made $100m (£64m) in a single month by selling Current TV to al-Jazeera for $70m and cashing in his shares of Apple stock for $30m. Never mind that al-Jazeera is owned by the government of Qatar, whose oil exports and views of women and minorities make a mockery of the ideas that Gore propounds in a book or film every other year. Never mind that his Apple stock came with his position on the company's board, a gift to a former presidential contender. Gore used to be a patrician politician whose career seemed inspired by the ideal of public service. Today – not unlike Tony Blair – he has traded on a life in politics to join the rarefied class of the global super-rich.

 

It is no wonder that more and more Americans believe the game is rigged. It is no wonder that they buy houses they cannot afford and then walk away from the mortgage when they can no longer pay. Once the social contract is shredded, once the deal is off, only suckers still play by the rules.

 

 

http://www.alternet....iety-unravelled

[cavanami]

With "leaders" like Obama...let the video do the talking...

 

http://blustream.sendvideo.net/stw/?p=nyi907f2201klkgtjiyv