American State of the Union: A Festival of Lies
by Glen Ford
Published on Friday, January 31, 2014 by Black Agenda Report
EXCERPT...
Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have “deepened” the gap between the rich and the rest of us and “stalled” upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be “a year of action” in the opposite direction. “Believe it.” And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar of the young century.
Lies of omission are even more despicable than the overt variety, because they hide. The potentially most devastating Obama contribution to economic inequality is being crafted in secret by hundreds of corporate lobbyists and lawyers and their revolving-door counterparts in government. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, described as “NAFTA on steroids,” would accelerate the global Race to the Bottom that has made a wasteland of American manufacturing, plunging the working class into levels of poverty and insecurity without parallel in most people’s lifetimes, and totally eviscerating the meager gains of three generations of African Americans. Yet, the closest Obama came to even an oblique allusion to his great crime-in-the-making, was to announce that “new trade partnerships with Europe and the Asia-Pacific will help (small businesses) create even more jobs. We need to work together on tools like bipartisan trade promotion authority to protect our workers, protect our environment and open new markets to new goods stamped ‘Made in the USA.’" Like NAFTA twenty years ago – only far bigger and more diabolically destructive – TPP will have the opposite effect, destroying millions more jobs and further deepening worker insecurity. The Trans Pacific Partnership expands the legal basis for global economic inequalities – which is why the negotiations are secret, and why the treaty’s name could not be spoken in the State of the Union address. It is a lie of omission of global proportions. Give Obama his crown.
SNIP...
What is Obama’s jobs program? It is the same as laid out at last year’s State of the Union, and elaborated on last summer: lower business taxes and higher business subsidies. When you say “jobs,” he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares. “Both Democrats and Republicans have argued that our tax code is riddled with wasteful, complicated loopholes that punish businesses investing here, and reward companies that keep profits abroad. Let's flip that equation. Let's work together to close those loopholes, end those incentives to ship jobs overseas, and lower tax rates for businesses that create jobs right here at home.” Actually, Obama wants to lower tax rates for all corporations to 28 percent, from 35 percent, as part of his ongoing quest for a Grand Bargain with Republicans. For Obama, the way to bring jobs back to the U.S. is to make American taxes and wages more “competitive” in the “global marketplace” – the Race to the Bottom.
In the final analysis, the sympathetic corporate Democrat and the arrogant corporate Republican offer only small variations on the same menu: ever increasing austerity. Obama bragged about reducing the deficit, never acknowledging that this has been accomplished on the backs of the poor, contributing mightily to economic inequality and social insecurity.
CONTINUED...
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/31-2
PS: Mr. Ford reminds us we must see the Big Picture, even if it doesn't show us what we hoped it would.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Seems like you are responding to me.
enter into a discussion. You can't discuss something with someone who refuses to say where they stand. I'm about ISSUES, seems a lot of the discussion from those who appear to be reluctant to state where they stand, is about Politicians. So I'd like to keep the focus on the ISSUE which is a very serious one.
trying to grab it but it keeps slipping from your hands, each time trying to keep it from going over the edge and back into the sea.
I don't know why...
that was being held in the Japanese Diet/Parliament. One of the representatives whose district includes some of the best farmland in Japan was very unhappy with the proposal, and provided the following chart to make her point:
The farm products in the far left column are, from top to bottom, wheat, beets, potatoes, dairy, beef cattle, and pork. The column next to that shows how much income from these farm products could be lost due to the TPP, compared with 2006 production (unit: 100 million yen, or roughly 1 million dollars). The next column shows expected losses in related industries. The 4th column shows expected losses to the local economy. The column on the far right shows expected losses in employment (unit: persons, except for dairy and total, which is 10,000 persons). Total estimated losses would be 503.7 billion yen, or 5 billion dollars, and 40,000 lost jobs, just for that region, which is the Tokachi region on the island of Hokkaido.
and he has a supermajority in both houses.
Here he is listening to the TPP presentation made by the Hokkaido representative:
Not a shock coming from DU's resident "Authoritarian Buster".
Sid
First I've heard of that site, but after looking around it for a bit, I get that is a crap site.
Thanks for all the info you have provided in this thread!
I think something just clicked in me with her. She is truly brilliant - especially in her ass handing. She definitely doesn't let the assery run it's course around here but she is straight forward and polite - whereas I'm a passive aggressive little snot who throws hugs and "there there's" at the stupidity.
enough Friday night that I would have racked up a few hides.
Let's call this what it is, though....taking a break from crop circles, the OP has decided to undertake a studied critique of the President's SOTU. His primary source for this critique is a man who wrote that President Obama danced like Mr. Bojangles to get around the issues at hand.
Now, if a DUer wrote that, I would ask Skinner to ban them.
But, apparently, the OP thinks this is a fit source to critique the President. Why this source is fit to post, although they are undeniable racist, bitter, and disgusting is an inquiry worth pursuing. I find it paternalistic, racist, and offensive.
Glen Ford's obscene, and utterly racist tirade against the President, ("He is a knife in our hearts"
available in full, at the link given above, should give the OP considerable pause. He should apologize.
You can say that again. 
Nice to see you!!
scum of the internet to find the most stupid ODS articles it can come up with, brave.
disingenuous propaganda agenda.. no matter what the color. 
Who's that? The friend of plutocracy.
"You can't help those who simply will not be helped. One problem that we've had, even in the best of times, is people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice." -- President Reagan, 1/31/84, on Good Morning America, defending his administration against charges of callousness.
You want more Trickle-Down Voodoo Reaganomics?
Then Friend Larry Summers.
Evidence of an American Plutocracy: The Larry Summers Story
By Matthew Skomarovsky
LilSis.org
Jan 10, 2011 at 19:31 EST
EXCERPT...
Another new business model Rubin and Summers made possible was Enron. Rubin had known Enron well through Goldman Sachs’s financing of the company, and recused himself from matters relating to Enron in his first year on the Clinton team. He and Summers went on to craft policies at Treasury that were essential to Enron’s lucrative energy trading business, and they were in touch with Enron executives and lobbyists all the while. Enron meanwhile won $2.4 billion in foreign development deals from Clinton’s Export-Import Bank, then run by Kenneth Brody, a former protege of Rubin’s at Goldman Sachs.
Soon after Rubin joined Citigroup, its investment banking division picked up Enron as a client, and Citigroup went on to become Enron’s largest creditor, loaning almost $1 billion to the company. As revelations of massive accounting fraud and market manipulation emerged over the next years and threatened to bring down the energy company, Rubin and Summers intervened. While Enron’s rigged electricity prices in California were causing unprecedented blackouts, Summers urged Governor Gray Davis to avoid criticizing Enron and recommended further deregulatory measures. Rubin was an official advisor to Gov. Davis on energy market issues at the time, while Citigroup was heavily invested in Enron’s fraudulent California business, and he too likely put pressure on the Governor to lay off Enron. Rubin also pulled strings at Bush’s Treasury Department in late 2001, calling a former employee to see if Treasury could ask the major rating agencies not to downgrade Enron, and Rubin also lobbied the rating agencies directly. (In all likelihood he made similar attempts in behalf of Citigroup during the recent financial crisis.) Their efforts ultimately failed, Enron went bust, thousands of jobs and pensions were destroyed, and its top executives went to jail. It’s hard to believe, but there was some white-collar justice back then.
SNIP...
Summers also starting showing up around the Hamilton Project, which Rubin had just founded with hedge fund manager Roger Altman. Altman was another Clinton official who had come from Wall Street, following billionaire Peter Peterson from Lehman Brothers to Blackstone Group, and he left Washington to found a major hedge fund in 1996. The Hamilton Project is housed in the Brookings Institution, a prestigious corporate-funded policy discussion center that serves as a sort of staging ground for Democratic elites in transition between government, academic, and business positions. The Hamilton Project would go on to host, more specifically, past and future Democratic Party officials friendly to the financial industry, and to produce a stream of similarly minded policy papers. Then-Senator Obama was the featured political speaker at Hamilton’s inaugural event in April 2006.
Summers joined major banking and political elites on Hamilton’s Advisory Council and appeared at many Hamilton events. During a discussion of the financial crisis in 2008, Summers was asked about his role in repealing Glass-Stegall, the law that forbade commercial and investment banking mergers like Citigroup. “I think it was the right thing to do,” he responded, noting that the repeal of Glass-Stegall made possible a wave of similar mergers during the recent financial crisis, such as Bank of America’s takeover of Merrill Lynch. He was arguing, in effect, that financial deregulation did not cause the financial crisis, it actually solved it. “We need a regulatory system as modern as the markets,” said Summers — quoting Rubin, who was in the room. “We need a hen house as modern as the food chain,” said the fox.
CONTINUED...
http://blog.littlesis.org/2011/01/10/evidence-of-an-ame... /
These are the richest times in history, with seven-eighths of all wealth ever, per David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's own Budget Director. Until we see economic fairness restored through fiscal and other government policies, laws and regulations; the rich will keep getting richer, the middle class will continue dissolving into the new poor, and the poor will become the super-majority. Of course, as money pays for lobbyists who write the laws and speech and cash are the same thing when it comes to elections, the majority perspective on policy will be silent as the grave.
That's who Cornel West and Tavis Smiley stand up to. I don't understand why you don't, Bravenak.
But yeah, isn't racism hilarious?
... for most of a century. It's no joke. You should learn more about it:
The people who tried to overthrow FDR in 1933 had kids.
And they are the ones* screwing America now.
What's different today, is we don't have Smedley Butler or FDR to stop them.
Baron de Rothschild and Prescott Bush Sr share a moment and some information, back in the day.
* Of course, it's not just a few rich families's offspring who screw the majority today. They've hired help and built up the giant noise machine to continue their work overthrowing the progress FDR and the New Deal brought America for 80 years.
Why would the nation and world's richest people do that? Progress costs money. And they don't want to pay for it, even when they've gained more wealth than all of history put together. Instead, whey continue to work -- legally, through government and lobbyists -- to amass even more, transferring the wealth of the many to themselves.
And instead of an armed mob led by a war hero, their weapon is "Supply Side Economics." To most Americans, that means Trickle-Down.
Please tell me you're defending BAR. Please tell me that's really what you're doing.
Sid
it's what they do.
I am still waiting for the promises of 4 years ago.
From a couple years back:
JFK tapes offer lesson in income inequality.
By Tom Putnam | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT JANUARY 24, 2012
DURING THE last days of his presidency, John F. Kennedy had a number of concerns on his mind. In tapes being released today by the Kennedy Library, we hear, for example, the president focus on his reelection and issues of economic inequality. What can we do, he asks his political advisers, to make voters “decide that they want to vote for us, Democrats? What is it we have to sell ’em? We hope we have to sell them prosperity, but for the average guy the prosperity is nil. He’s not unprosperous, but he’s not very prosperous. He’s not . . . very well-off. And the people who really are well-off hate our guts.’’ As questions about growing social inequity increasingly dominate our current political dialogue, it may be instructive to look back at how these issues played out a half century ago.
Having witnessed the country survive the Great Depression and World War II, JFK understood the economic and military vulnerabilities of democratic capitalism. Though insulated by his family’s wealth, JFK was affected by the poverty he witnessed on the 1960 campaign trail. One of the memorable lines from his inaugural address “if a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich’’ helps explain his first executive order: increasing surplus food allotments to poor communities across the nation.
Once in power, his economic policies were ideologically balanced, combining, for example, a proposed tax cut to stimulate the economy with efforts to raise the minimum wage and expand unemployment benefits. Like the current incumbent, JFK’s legislative efforts - especially those designed to help the poor and advance civil rights - were often stymied by members of Congress. During his 1962 State of the Union address he reminded his congressional colleagues: “The Constitution makes us not rivals for power but partners for progress. . . It is my task to report the State of the Union - to improve it is the task of us all.’’
In terms of his administration’s relationship with the “really well-off,’’ his most famous confrontation came during the steel crisis in 1962. Having helped to negotiate a non-inflationary wage settlement with the United Steelworkers Union, Kennedy thought he had an agreement with industry executives that, in exchange, they would not raise the price of steel that year.
CONTINUED...
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/01/24/jfk-offers-lessons-income-equality/ST1GsaQM77N0mWXoG8GT4L/story.html
Here's what I posted on DU on the subject in 2010:
JFK battled Wall Street and Big Business
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"
-- Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, Friday, January 20, 1961
So, in the short time he had, President Kennedy did what he could to balance the interests of concentrated wealth with the interests of the average American -- necessary for the good of the country.
Professor Donald Gibson detailed the issues in his 1994 book, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency.
From the book:
"What (J.F.K. tried) to do with everything from global investment patterns to tax breaks for individuals was to re-shape laws and policies so that the power of property and the search for profit would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country."
-- Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street. The Kennedy Presidency
More on the book, by two great Americans:
"Gibson captures what I believe to be the most essential and enduring aspect of the Kennedy presidency. He not only sets the historical record straight, but his work speaks volumes against today's burgeoning cynicism and in support of the vision, ideal, and practical reality embodied in the presidency of John F. Kennedy - that every one of us can make a difference." -- Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, Chair, House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs
"Professor Gibson has written a unique and important book. It is undoubtedly the most complete and profound analysis of the economic policies of President Kennedy. From here on in, anyone who states that Kennedy was timid or status quo or traditional in that field will immediately reveal himself ignorant of Battling Wall Street. It is that convincing." -- James DiEugenio, author, Destiny Betrayed. JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Had he lived to serve a second term, I'd bet on JFK over The Fed.
--------------
So, you see, BainsBane, there's a big difference.
Once, individual taxpayers and married couples could deduct credit card interest from their taxes. No more, although businesses are still allowed to do so.
Been the law since Oct. 22, 1986, when Pruneface signed The Tax Reform Act that eliminated interest deductions for loans to consumers, including credit cards. Nice deal for Wall Street. Would be nice to bring back before the middle class -- and its children struggling to pay off college loans -- are reduced to poverty.
~Russell Brand
[center]
[/center]
Response to Octafish (Original post)
Response to bravenak (Reply #31)
My father is much the same as yours and when clinton ran the first time I told my father I thought he was going to win long before the elections. Boy was my dad pissed. He told me I better hope and pray I was wrong. LOL sadly for him I was right 
Best President ever!!!!
And cause I know some will disapprove~
Pete Souza: President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden provide encouragement to Erick Varela, who was about to introduce the President, prior to an event to outline new efforts to help the long-term unemployed, in the Green Room of the White House
TOD
light-hearted moments, she. He has such a heavy burden to carry that he does so well. The balance is key!
TOD
So much hate tossed his way, sad to say from so many different directions.
You want to survive the out right never ending vitriol???!!~
Guess what, you take a romp with your dog. Yup that's Bo. Oh I know Bo has been disparaged here too~ Sad that.
Lucky Dog, she! When you consider the source of the disparagement it reads like a badge of honor. 
Lucky well cared for Doggies~
A great man. A complicated man. Helped make Arkansas a player on the global scale.
[font size="1"]“George W. Bush, Harken Energy and Jackson Stephens, ca 1979–90?[/font size]
BCCI IN THE UNITED STATES
Every good DUer knows Reagan and Trickle Down Economics in 1981 started moving money from the middle class and what little the poor had and put it into the pockets of the Haves and Have-Mores.
The thing is, the phrase "Robin Hood in Reverse" goes back to Nixon:
It first showed up in the mainstream in 1971. George Meany, the firebrand labor leader and famed president of the AFL-CIO, was reacting to Richard Nixon’s “New Economic Policy,” which called for wage and price controls to tame inflation, as well as lifting some excise taxes to stimulate spending. Meany called the plan “Robin Hood in Reverse, robbing the poor to pay the rich.”
Details from Robert Frank of CNBC: http://www.cnbc.com/id/48550350
From Nixon, of course, we can draw a line to the Barons of Wall Street who opposed FDR -- and their offspring. Instead of allowing such to continue robbing the Treasury through fiat and war, I'd find it patriotic to see them jailed for the harm they've done to the People and the nation.
Never give up.
As for the monkeys, did you ever notice this?
Good for Mores. Great for the Have-Mores.
BAR and wsws.org in the same thread!!
Jane Hamsher and we hit the trifecta.
Sid
Ducky of Awesome!
I'll watch this-
You need to go back to Roswell with a shovel and look for more evidence LOL
It should.
An Interview with Tim Anderson on Obama's Commerce Nominee, Penny Pritzker, the Sub-Prime Queen
The Privilege of the Pritzkers
by DENNIS BERNSTEIN
CounterPunch, May 3-5, 2013
EXCERPT...
TA: $38 billion. One publication listed eight casinos, another listed 13, with each license worth a half a million dollars. There is another $5-7 billion in casinos. When you own 13 casinos for 5-7 billion, you are a player in the casino business. That’s just the hotels and casinos. There are many other companies they own such as the second largest chewing tobacco company, which they sold for 3.5 billion dollars. They actually owned the second and third largest chewing tobacco company, but have since off-loaded those for billions of dollars. Many of their assets are not what society considers clean assets, but hey don’t care. As far as money goes, they want it. When it comes to casinos or chewing tobacco companies, they don’t care. Their wealth is almost incalculable, because according to Forbes magazine, they are the only family in America to have off shore tax-free trusts because they were grandfathered in. Their off shore trust can ship money back to their family tax-free. It was grandfathered in because their grandfather got it through Congress – he was smart to see the future and got it done. Congress closed the loophole and grandfathered him in. Forbesmagazine wrote about the Pritzker’s off shore trust, they emphasized that there are over 1000 separate trusts. Many families have two or three different savings accounts to keep track of what money belongs to who, but when you have over 1000 different trusts to handle the family estate it’s very hard to comprehend how much wealth there is and how many businesses they control. A few years ago, Penny sold TransUnion, the largest credit reporting agency in America, but there’s a question about whether she sold it to herself by selling it to various hedge funds which her family has a large interest in. Until she sold it, you could say that Penny Pritzker had more files on every citizen in America than the CIA and FBI combined, because everybody has a credit score and credit report. Penny Pritzker had the credit scores and report on every single citizen in America.
SNIP...
TA: She had TransUnion while she had Superior Bank, so she controlled the credit scores of everybody who was getting a subprime loan. You pay a higher interest on your subprime loan based on your credit score. Whether or not it was ever brokered between the credit bureau and the bank, we don’t know, but we know the same people control both entities.
SNIP...
TA: Superior Bank was acquired back in 1989 as part of the original savings and loan giveaway by M, D and E Wall. As I wrote a in a paper for an economic conference in Denver, Superior Bank was sold to the Pritzkers for 42.5 million dollars. They changed the name from Lion Savings and Loan to Superior Bank after they acquired it. Lion Savings and Loan was sold to the Pritzkers just to put up money for the capital. But as government reports show, they only put up a million dollars cash and pledged their assets as the difference, the capital. That’s not supposed to be done, but they are privileged people so they get privileged deals. After they acquired this for $1 million they also got $640 million in tax credits.
SNIP...
TA: The tax credits were designed so they could use it in any entity they wanted. They didn’t have to use it on what they bought. It could be sold on the open market for value, the credits could be used to file back taxes or warehouse them for future taxes. So for a million dollars, they got 640 million dollars for agreeing to take over Superior Bank, which they then looted for years then gave it back to the government with an enormous loss to the uninsured depositors and the whole subprime industry.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/03/the-privilege-of-the-pritzkers/
When I voted for Barack Obama, I believed he was going to appoint people who were interested in real change to positions of power. That didn't happen, did it?
1) counterpunch
2) repeating the glen beckian type "Obama is penny pritzker's puppet" type spew...
u been reading TheBlaze much bro?
Oh my God. I'm sitting here with my fist in the air, girl!!!
And I travel by your thoughts all the time. I'm Chickasaw but light complected so a lot of my associates think me white. That's where you see a lot of covert racism.
You know what? I call them on their bullshit every. damned. time.
You have to shame fearful braggarts if nothing else works. I have NO problem gettin' in folk's grill if they can't see the error of their thinkin'.
Racism is wrong and it's just gone underground now. That's all. 
Sid
Who ever heard of government doing anything, apart from creating jobs to help end the Depression and winning World War II because of a highly publicly educated populace? No, today we know it's like Ronald Reagan said: It's the private sector that does great things, like nuclear power, apart from the MANHATTAN Project and providing insurance through the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act, that is, and jobs!
Agree 100-percent, randr. We could rebuild the nation and transform the planet with half of what we spend on defense each year. Anyone who can read knows there are so many problems to solve, needs to meet, and challenges to overcome that were government to ACT like it did in forming the programs of the New Deal, there would be two jobs for every applicant. Instead, we take the head-in-the-sand posture of the Geritol guzzling pruneface actor who should be on Rush Mountmore, judging from how his policies still rule Wall Street on the Potomac.
Sid
Had to say Ford, wouldn't want another false alert.
Machiavelli's maxim, perfected by billionaires and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. Example:
Theo Lubke
For the government: Chairman of the New York Fed
On Wall Street: Chief Regulatory Reform officer at Goldman Sachs
SNIP...
Mona Sutphen
For the government: Obama’s Deputy Chief of Staff
On Wall Street: She's just been hried to head up macro analysis for the bank at UBS
More examples: http://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-washington-revolving-door-2011-4?op=1
-p
It's a strategy, her and her buds gets your post censured so the tone of the thread can be changed. Pretty basic strategy. I would tell you what an old timer told me, but that would get me censured too. Good Luck on DU!
-p
Oh and I forgot, after enough them then you can just get banned! yeay!
"It's a strategy, her and her buds gets your post censured so the tone of the thread can be changed. Pretty basic strategy. I would tell you what an old timer told me, but that would get me censured too. Good Luck on DU!"
Rabid paranoia. I sincerely hope that no one is that interested in you.
-p
Thanks for clarifying.
Wow! Now your a mission huh?
-p
-p
And your post gets to stand. How handy.
-p
you might get it hidden. I don't give a shit
But you go on with your bad self.
Good Day! Happy hugs and all!
-p
PS...I'm so sorry, but you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Roses and Hugs!
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/why-barack-obama-more-effective-evil
Obamacare is Doomed by Its Internal Logic
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/obamacare-doomed-its-internal-logic
Fight him this election year. Fight him every year that he’s here.
Dude is a loon.
I can see the general segue from logic to absurd in the leap you make. I'll include that in my analysis.
Cheers all you lovely people!
-p
a theme in all these attacks on the SOTU: attacking the health care website and proposed actions by Obama.
They hate the fact that the health care law is working and that the President is going to do stuff.
This is why these screeds are laced with memes about "historical" inequity, as if to create the perception that Obama's policies caused a four-decade in the making problem.
They completely ignore the steps he has taken to address the issue, but declare he deserves the blame.
Obamacare works, and it's pissing off people like Ford.
Here's one Joseph Wilson I do identify with:
Here's why -- he questions authority, even when his party heads the executive branch:
Valerie Plame And Joe Wilson:
'What Exactly Is The US Government Doing In The People's Name To 'Keep Us Safe?'
ROB WILE
Business Insider, JUN. 23, 2013, 7:38 PM
In an op-ed published by The Guardian, former CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson and former diplomat Joe Wilson lay into the arguments being made to defend the NSA's domestic surveillance program.
Their views would seem to carry some additional weight given a former White House advisor was sentenced to prison for lying during the investigation into who leaked Plame's name while she was still undercover.
That reportedly happened in retaliation for her husband's op-ed casting doubt on claims made by the Bush administration about Iraq's interest in weapons of mass destruction.
The pair write:
Prism and other NSA data-mining programs might indeed be very effective in hunting and capturing actual terrorists, but we don't have enough information as a society to make that decision. Despite laudable efforts led by Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall to bring this to the public 's attention that were continually thwarted by the administration because everything about this program was deemed "too secret", Congress could not even exercise its oversight responsibilities. The intelligence community and their friends on the Hill do not have a right to interpret our rights absent such a discussion.
They also go after intelligence contractors, which they say now comprises a "vast intelligence-industrial complex":
Today, the intelligence sector is so immense that no one person can manage, or even comprehend, its reach. When an operation in the field goes south, who would we prefer to try and correct the damage: a government employee whose loyalty belongs to his country (despite a modest salary), or the subcontractor who wants to ensure that his much fatter paycheck keeps coming?
SOURCE: http://www.businessinsider.com/valerie-plame-and-joe-wilson-on-nsa-2013-6
You could learn a lot from Joseph Wilson and Valerie Plame, struggle4progress.
Almost forgot: The other Joe Wilson, I seldom think of -- unless reminded of him by smear artistes or know-nothings.
Keep it up Octa, they are getting desperate!
It's like an "Involuntary Facebook for the 1-percent."
Here's hoping for democratic change via truth, AzDar!
"''Wall Street–the 1 percent–believes the world is theirs for the taking, and they want all of it.''"
The OP is about the President's SOTU.
Another week, another outburst by a one-percenter comparing progressive taxation to Nazi atrocities. I particularly liked the end:
Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?
<...>
You do wonder why the WSJ published this screed. Do billionaires have the right to get their views aired, regardless? Did the Journal think that it was doing a public service by letting the rest of us see the loose screws in this guy’s head? Or — what I suspect, to be frank — did the relevant editors actually think he was making a useful point?
Anyway, thinking about this sort of thing makes me realize that there’s a danger, especially for progressives, of confusing the proposition that Obama’s billionaire haters are stark raving mad — which is true — with the proposition that Obama has done nothing that hurts the plutocrats’ interests, which is false. Actually, Obama has been tougher on the one percent than most progressives give him credit for.
Start with taxes. The Bush tax cuts haven’t gone completely away, but at the very high end they have been pretty much reversed; plus there are additional high-end taxes associated with Obamacare. The result is that taxes on wealthy Americans have basically been rolled back to pre-Reagan levels:
- more -
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/obama-and-the-one-percent
