Bury The Public Option Says Your Congress, Investigate Financial Crimes!
January 11th, 2010 - by: danny
From “Go” by William Rivers Pitt of Truthout.org
“If you’re disappointed in Mr. Obama, go back to your anti-Bush roots and put together some concerted activism. Organize a protest, or a letter-writing campaign or find a Congressional candidate you like and volunteer to help them. Raise money, raise issues and start pushing back against what you believe to be wrong. If you support Mr. Obama and the Democrats, get back on your ’08 horse and ride to the rescue, because for sure they need all the help you can provide. Get back into the game, and stop being paralyzed and demoralized because politicians aren’t doing the right thing.
[More here → including listening to Mr. Pitt read this column]
CONGRESS TO BURY PUBLIC OPTION
YEMEN TO TALK WITH AL QAEDA
BANK BONUSES, PROBE COMING
In the fight between the money and the power of insurance companies and their benefactors and the public over health care, guess who won?
PUBLIC OPTION, RIP
AP: WASHINGTON — Senior House Democrats have largely abandoned hopes of including a government-run insurance option in the final compromise health care bill taking shape, according to several officials, and are pushing for other measures to rein in private insurers. [More here →]
Weekends may be made for Michelob but they are also either news deserts or driven by breaking headlines. It’s Saturday night and there are reports of an earthequake off the coast of California. Maybe a higher power or the earth itself is in revolt, mad at America for all the time we are wasting to fixing some urgent problems like wars, health care, financial fraud and the like. The State of Arnold is broke so maybe this will be a “godsend” and it will qualify for disaster assistance.
Here I go being glib again. I am sure it’s terrible if you are in the center of it. Years ago, I visited Northridge, California after a quake hit there in 1994 – it wasn’t a pretty sight.
There are also convulsions in our politics as the Senator Majority Leader aka “the man from Searchlight,” apologizes to the President for an earlier racial slur. The Prez accepts saying it’s ok because he knows what’s in Harry’s heart.
Touching.
And then you read that Blackwater, now Xe, is bidding for a another government contract:
AP: “The company is in the running for a Pentagon contract potentially worth $1 billion to train Afghanistan’s troubled national police force. Xe has been shifting to training, aviation and logistics work after its security guards were accused of killing unarmed Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.” [More here →]
Chris Floyd writes about this: Blackwater Fever: High Crimes and Hired Guns
“Scott Horton of Harper’s gives us chapter and verse of the Justice Department’s very deliberate — and insultingly brazen — sabotaging of its own case against the Blackwater mercenaries who murdered 17 Iraqis in Nisoor Square back in September 2007. As any sentient observer could have told you then, these hired killers — gorging on taxpayer dollars as they assisted the mass-murdering invasion and occupation of Iraq — were never going to do time. Why should they? They were just doing what they were paid, by us, to do: kill ragheads.
The case was dismissed by a federal judge last week due to prosecutorial misconduct. In an interview with Democracy Now, Horton explained how the bad deal went down: …” [More here →]
Read more and puke.
Army’s Back Door Draft – Soldier Jailed For Speaking Out
• Marc Hall jailed for angry ‘Stop-Loss’ Hip Hop song [GRAPHIC lyrics]
“Stop-lossed Army Specialist Marc Hall (aka Hip Hop artist Marc Watercus) was placed in the Liberty County Jail Friday, December 11 for speaking out against the continuing policy that has barred him from exiting the military, including recording an angry and explicit song. Servicemembers do not completely give up their rights to free speech, and certainly not when they do so artistically while off duty. However, the military intends to hold Marc in the county jail for months of pre-trial punishment before court martial. This could become a precedent setting case for boundaries of dissent within the ranks.” [More here →]
• Glenn Greenwald: Three Cheers For Helen Thomas, Again
For asking the questions that need to be asked about the endless war on terror [More here →]
KATHY KELLY ON AFGHANISTAN:
“Kai Eide, the outgoing Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Afghanistan, briefed the UN Security Council on January 5, 2010. With regard to military activities, he bluntly stated that “civilian casualties, house searches, and detention policies are sources of recruitment for the insurgency.”
President Obama’s administration is soon expected to request another “emergency” supplemental expenditure for the Iraq and Afghan wars, this time for between 40 and 50 billion dollars. If (some would say, when) this figure is approved, it will make 2010 fiscally the most costly year of the ongoing War on Terror, surpassing President Bush’s expenditures by a significant margin. Before the year is out, President Obama will also have submitted a budget item to fund the wars in 2011, with military services already planning to request something in the range of $160 to $165 billion.” [More here →]
And all the while, another war is cruelly waged on the homeland …
ECONOMY
Must read: The Other Plot to Wreck America by Frank Rich:
“What we don’t know will hurt us, and quite possibly on a more devastating scale than any Qaeda attack. Americans must be told the full story of how Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble, made out like bandits, and then left millions of households in ruin. Without that reckoning, there will be no public clamor for serious reform of a financial system that was as cunningly breached as airline security at the Amsterdam airport. And without reform, another massive attack on our economic security is guaranteed. Now that it can count on government bailouts, Wall Street has more incentive than ever to pump up its risks – secure that it can keep the bonanzas while we get stuck with the losses.” [More here →]
• FDIC Plan to Link Premiums to Compensation Already Under Fire
Two Ohio lawmakers are gearing up for round two of their push for a six-month freeze on home foreclosures, taking their case to the Senate for the first time since the Ohio House passed the bill in May. [More here →]
• ml-Implode.com: Record bonus pot at JP Morgan
“JP Morgan Chase is set to defy calls for constraint over bankers’ bonuses this week when it delivers an expected $29bn ( £18bn) compensation pot for its executives.” [More here →]
• Are You “braced?” for the “bonus backlash?” The banks Are, according to the FInancial Times:
• “Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and other big banks are bracing for a renewed public and political backlash against their compensation plans as they prepare to unveil multi-billion dollar bonus packages.”
Road Construction Program Fails To Generate Jobs
• Remember–how the stimulus bill would stimulate jobs with “shovel ready” infrastructure projects? Guess What?
• (AP) WASHINGTON — Ten months into President Barack Obama’s first economic stimulus plan, a surge in spending on roads and bridges has had no effect on local unemployment and only barely helped the beleaguered construction industry, an Associated Press analysis has found.
Spend a lot or spend nothing at all, it didn’t matter, the AP analysis showed: Local unemployment rates rose and fell regardless of how much stimulus money Washington poured out for transportation, raising questions about Obama’s argument that more road money would address an “urgent need to accelerate job growth.”
• Study: More families using food stamps to feed kids By David Goldstein | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON – The United States has more poor children now than it did a year ago. As recession-hammered families increase, more are using food stamps to feed their kids, according to a study by the Brookings Institution and First Focus, a bipartisan child advocacy group. [More here →]
• MARKETWATCH: HOLDER ANNOUNCES PLAN TO FIGHT FINANCIAL FRAUD
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday that the newly mandated interagency Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force will focus on rooting out four specific areas of financial crime, ranging from simple mortgage fraud to complicated scams designed to steal money from the government-stimulus programs.
“These crimes have only added to the challenges we face in overcoming the financial crisis that has gripped our economy for the past two years. And they have led to a growing sentiment that Wall Street does not play by the same rules as Main Street,” he added. [More here →]
• Mainjustice.com adds: Holder: Financial Fraud Is ‘Glaring’ Threat
The fiscal year 2010 DOJ budget signed into law last month includes funds for 43 positions in U.S. Attorney’s offices to help combat financial fraud.
“This budget represents the largest-ever, single-year enhancement to support and expand the Justice Department’s financial fraud programs,” Holder said. “This will allow for additional FBI agents, prosecutors and support staff to aggressively pursue mortgage fraud, corporate fraud and other economic crimes.” [More here →]
IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD:
• YEMEN: READY TO TALK
SAN’A, Yemen — Yemen’s president said he is ready to open a dialogue with al-Qaida fighters who lay down their weapons and renounce violence, despite U.S. pressure to crack down on the terror group. The United States has complained in the past that Yemen struck deals with al-Qaida fighters and freed them from prison after they promised not to engage in terrorism. Some later broke those promises and are now believed to be active in al-Qaida’s offshoot in Yemen.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh vowed that his government is “determined to stand up to the challenges” of al-Qaida and that his security forces will track down as many al-Qaida fighters as possible among those who refuse to stop violence. [More here →]
• DON’T FENCE ME IN
(Ha’aretz) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday ordered to construct a fence at a cost of $1.5 billion along two segments of Israel’s border with Egypt, in an attempt to stem the infiltration of migrant workers as well as of terrorist elements into Israel. Netanyahu told officials gathered at the Prime Minister’s Office that the goal of the project “was to ensure the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel.” [More here →]
• PALESTINIANS; NO PEACE TALKS WITH OUT PRECONDITIONS
GAZA/RAMALLAH, Jan. 9 (Xinhua) — The Palestinian National Authority (PNA) on Saturday rejected a U.S. call for resuming the stalled peace talks with Israel without preconditions, demanding a full settlement freeze in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Gaza Strip ruling Islamic Hamas movement warned the PNA against any resumption and cautioned that Israel will be the only beneficiary of the peace talks. [More here →]
IN MEMORIAM, ANOTHER FRIEND: BILL SUTHERLAND, Pan African Pacifist, 1918-2010
Bill Sutherland, unofficial ambassador between the peoples of Africa and the Americas for over fifty years, died peacefully on the evening of January 2, 2010. He was 91.
A life-long pacifist and liberation advocate, Sutherland became involved in civil rights and anti-war activities as a youthful member of the Student Christian Movement in the 1930s. Sutherland was raised in New Jersey, the son of a prominent dentist and youngest brother to Reiter Sutherland and to Muriel Sutherland Snowden of Boston, who founded Freedom House in 1949 and was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” grant. He spent four years at Lewisburg Federal Correctional Facility in the 1940s as a conscientious objector to World War Two, striking up what became life-long friendships with fellow C.O.s Ralph DiGia, Bayard Rustin, George Houser, Dave Dellinger, and others.
In 1951, in the early days of the Cold War, Sutherland, DiGia, Dellinger, and Quaker pacifist Art Emory constituted the Peacemaker bicycle project, which took the message of nuclear disarmament to both sides of the Iron Curtain. [More here →]
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About Danny Schechter
Danny Schechter is an Emmy award winning journalist, television producer and independent filmmaker who also writes, blogs and speaks about media issues.
His latest film is PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time.
Mr. Schechter is NOT the Godfather of Soul.
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