sad sally
sad sally's JournalAt House Hearing, JP Morgan Chief Jamie Dimon Evades Simple Question: Janitor to Dimon: Why Do You
Source: Reuters
Deny the People Cleaning Your Buildings a Living Wage?
WASHINGTON, June 19, 2012
Rep. Green (D-TX) Raises Plight of Janitors, Says "Too Small to Live Off"
WASHINGTON, June 19, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The following is being released by the Service Employees International Union:
Earlier today, following JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon's testimony in front of the House Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Committee regarding his company's recent massive banking loss, Adriana Vasquez, a janitor who cleans the JP Morgan Chase tower in Houston, Texas confronted him with a simple question: "Despite making billions last year, why do you deny the people cleaning your buildings a living wage?"
Dimon evaded Adriana's question but told her to, "Call his office," to arrange a meeting.
Each night, Vasquez cleans 24 bathrooms across 11 floors in the JP Morgan Chase tower in downtown Houston. "I work hard each and every day scrubbing 24 bathrooms just to support my children, to keep food on the table and a roof over my head – but it still isn't enough," explained Vasquez. "I traveled to Washington, DC to confront Jamie Dimon because it is not acceptable that while he makes billions, he denies the people cleaning his buildings a living wage."
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/19/idUS182160+19-Jun-2012+PRN20120619
Dimon is afforded exclusive access to all people political - not so for most Americans.
Dark Ages Redux: American Politics and the End of the Enlightenment
Published on Monday, June 18, 2012 by Common Dreams - by John Atcheson
We are witnessing an epochal shift in our socio-political world. We are de-evolving, hurtling headlong into a past that was defined by serfs and lords; by necromancy and superstition; by policies based on fiat, not facts.
Much of what has made the modern world in general, and the United States in particular, a free and prosperous society comes directly from insights that arose during the Enlightenment.
Too bad we’re chucking it all out and returning to the Dark Ages.
snip
And the descent into the Dark Ages is marked by more than global warming. Take austerity budgets. There is an extensive historical record showing that implementing austerity measures in an economic slowdown is counter productive. And this data is backed up by current experience in Europe, where austerity measures have been disastrous.
So the data is telling us austerity during a jobs crisis hasn’t worked in the past and isn’t working now. What to do?
Pass an austerity budget, of course.
Welcome to the Dark Ages.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/06/18-2
Progressive Morality and the Looming Presidential Election
ROBERT C. KOEHLER FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
To what extent will progressive morality be a factor in the looming presidential election? Is it simply a nuisance? Will mainstream Democrats (yet again) cringe in its presence, disavow it, spout mostly Republican-lite platitudes about tough-guy patriotism-- and, positioning themselves, as ever, as the Lesser of Two Evils, count the progressive vote as theirs?
The election season, which ought to be more about promoting values than candidates, is barely about values at all, except as weaknesses to manipulate.
Ah, democracy! In post-modern America, the political establishment has quietly uncoupled the word from its definition even as it affects to promote democracy around the world. Campaigns celebrate and dismantle candidates' personalities and stand for no more than variations of the status quo.
snip
And politically, of course, the public sphere - a.k.a., government - is as much the enemy to conservatives as terrorists are, even though private success is impossible without it. There's no insult more severe than calling someone a "socialist." The insult is without rationality but is deeply moral in its (flawed) meaning.
So, once again, I ask, why is this? Why have the Democrats remained stalled between solid moral positions since their last major moral stand, which was to support the civil rights movement and dismantle the political infrastructure of Jim Crow? Wouldn't it be easier to mobilize their base if they positioned themselves at its center rather than hemmed and hawed at the periphery, arguing policy instead of standing up for what's right? Wouldn't this reinvigorate not just the candidates and the party but our entire democracy?
http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13550
Tomgram: Peter Van Buren, The Ultimate No-Fly List - Leaking War
from Tom Engelhardt's intro to Peter Van Buren's "Leaking War"
Last week, touching down in India on his way to Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta described reality as you seldom hear it in the confines of Washington and, while he was at it, put his stamp of approval on a new global doctrine for the United States. Panetta is, of course, the man who, as director of the CIA, once called its drone air campaign in the Pakistani borderlands “the only game in town.” (At the time, as now, it was a classified, “covert” set of air strikes that were a secret to no one in Washington, Islamabad, or anywhere else on Earth.)
In India, expressing his frustration over U.S. relations with Pakistan, he spoke the “W-word” aloud for the first time. “We are,” he told his Indian hosts, “fighting a war in the FATA [the Pakistani tribal areas].” How true. Washington has indeed long been involved in a complex, confusing, escalating, and undoubtedly self-defeating partial war with Pakistan, never until now officially called by that name, even as the intensity of the drone air campaign in that country’s borderlands continues to ratchet up. So give Panetta credit for rare bluntness.
snip
Leaking War
White is black and down is up. Leaks that favor the president are shoveled out regardless of national security, while national security is twisted to pummel leaks that do not favor him. Watching their boss, bureaucrats act on their own, freelancing the punishment of whistleblowers, knowing their retaliatory actions will be condoned. The United States rains Hellfire missiles down on its enemies, with the president alone sitting in judgment of who will live and who will die by his hand.
The issue of whether the White House leaked information to support the president’s reelection while crushing whistleblower leaks it disfavors shouldn’t be seen as just another O’Reilly v. Maddow sporting event. What lies at the nexus of Obama’s targeted drone killings, his self-serving leaks, and his aggressive prosecution of whistleblowers is a president who believes himself above the law, and seems convinced that he alone has a preternatural ability to determine right from wrong.
Read all at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/
Don't Be Fooled By Obama's Faux-Righteous Indignation About Leaks
JUN 11 2012, Conor Friedersdorf
The president hasn't endangered national security -- and Congress is pursuing the wrong solution. America needs less classified info, not fewer leaks.
When Joseph Heller's literary heirs satirize the War on Terror's absurdity (for there is absurdity in every war), the treatment of classified information is sure to be as fruitful a theme as it was in Catch-22. For example, the CIA bombarded Pakistan last week with three days of drone strikes, ultimately killing Al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi. This didn't surprise anyone, for the whole world knows that the CIA uses drones to target Al Qaeda in Pakistan. The drone program is nevertheless classified. The Department of Justice says as much when explaining to judges why it shouldn't be forced to litigate certain cases. And White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is forced into vague locutions when asked about drone kills. "Our intelligence community has intelligence that leads them to believe that Al Qaeda's number-two leader, al-Libi, is dead," he said last week. "I can't get into details about how his death was brought about."
Yet even as most Obama Administration officials are insistent that they can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a drone program, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, former head of the CIA, has acknowledged its existence on numerous occasions. John Brennan, the White House's top counterterrorism adviser, has acknowledged its existence too. Ditto Attorney General Eric Holder. And even President Obama himself has acknowledged that the program exists. In their comments, these men have all defended it against its critics. Meanwhile, certain folks privy to the CIA drone program who doubt its efficacy are prohibited from making their arguments, or even acknowledging that the covert program exists.
Absurd, isn't it?
It's an abuse of power too. The Obama Administration demands that various things be kept secret for national-security reasons. By talking about those very things, it demonstrates either that it is harming national security, or that it exploits the classification system for leverage in the political realm.
But which one?
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/dont-be-fooled-by-obamas-faux-righteous-indignation-about-leaks/258316/
Senators quietly laying groundwork for looming defense sequestration fight
(note - this is a bipartisan group, not just Republicans. Graham has indicated he'd go along with tax increases if the additional revenue was earmarked entirely to defense. Military budget planners have been ordered NOT to plan on sequestration to devise scenarios for meeting the demands of sequestration. Paperwork trails like that, if leaked, would tell Congress there might be a way to deal with such drastic cuts.
…“They said they had all been ordered not to. It would be a violation. It would be a crime,” one participant told The Times.
An Army officer said, according to the participant: “I would be disobeying orders. I would be violating my orders and essentially committing a criminal act if I did any analytics on sequestration at this point.” MIC at the expense of everything else. ain't America great or what?) end of my rant; article follows.
By Carlo Munoz - 06/10/12
While it is all but guaranteed that Congress won't weigh in on how to handle the nearly $500 billion in looming defense cuts until after the presidential election, that has not stopped a handful of senators from laying the groundwork for that coming fight.
A bipartisan group of roughly 30 senators have been meeting behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, busily discussing possible funding alternatives that could be formulated into a compromise sequestration plan, according to members of a new debt reduction task force sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The Pentagon is already staring down a roughly $450 billion decrease in spending spread across the next 10 years as a result of the debt deal lawmakers approved last August.
But after a bipartisan supercommittee, created as part of the White House's debt restructuring deal last year, failed to trim $1.2 trillion from federal coffers, DOD was saddled with an additional $500 billion in automatic cuts over the next decade under the sequestration plan.
Those automatic reductions would put the department in a nearly $1 trillion hole — a situation that top U.S. defense officials claim would break the back of the military.
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/budget-appropriations/231931-senators-quietly-laying-groundwork-for-looming-defense-sequestration-fight-
Out to the Wall
by Kathy Kelly, June 08, 2012
"On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall …
… my grandfather took me out to the wall."
Kabul — When we arrived at the museum, two legless men wheeled themselves past us, traveling in wooden carts operated by a hand-held steering device. Inside Kabul’s OMAR museum, which houses ordnance and land mines used in Afghanistan over four decades of warfare, there were many more pictures of legless, armless and eyeless survivors of land mine explosions lining the walls. The OMAR organization bravely collects and defuses abandoned mines and cluster bomblets before they can produce more casualties such as these (and casualties that are far, far worse) among men, women, and children in Afghanistan.
snip
Another display case of bomblets from a cluster bomb noted that in 2001 the U.S. had dropped unnumbered cluster bombs each consisting of exactly 202 bomblets. Many of the bomblets would not explode on landfall but would wait years to be stepped on, or picked up, or else driven over or ploughed through by an unsuspecting victim. They looked like yellow building blocks that any unschooled child might take for a plaything, as many had.
snip
Our guide insisted that before leaving we should all climb into a very old plane parked outside the museum. Once inside, we realized that the plane’s cabin had been converted into a classroom where children visiting the museum were shown films about land mines – how villages could go about clearing them, and how children could avoid them. They were encouraged never to touch a land mine, to identify partially exposed mines on sight, and to understand how terrible these weapons are. With shock I remembered visiting the Intrepid Museum years before, a converted U.S. aircraft carrier that is still moored at its pier in Manhattan, and feeling outraged that the school teachers who had brought their students there would allow the children to climb into the tiny coin-operated facsimile bomber aircraft that let them aim bombs, using a joystick, not even at individual humans but at whole countries, at maps of Iraq and Central Asia, allowing them to imagine bombing whole peoples, for fun, without seeing a single human face.
snip
And it’s a cliché, but in many ways World War III is starting, is already underway. It’s happening now. The crises in climate stability and global health that international cooperation might have delayed or prevented – incurable TB appearing as predicted in the slums of India, uncontainable in the absence of anything resembling a healthcare system and destined for worldwide spread; global warming data exceeding our former worst-case scenarios. These were crises we ignored in order to fight our butter battle. And our resource wars brought us the chain of escalating economic detonations that seems far from over.
the whole article is at: http://original.antiwar.com/kelly/2012/06/07/out-to-the-wall/
Clinton, then Summers, now Bernanke - will the President agree with them?
During the Joint Economic Hearing this a.m., Bernanke was asked whether the Bush(Obama) tax cuts should be extended. His response, similar to Clinton's and Summers's sure sounds like more piling on to make sure these tax cuts for ALL income earners remain where they are.
Can't help but think that every time this call is made by anybody but a Republican, it's done to get us ready for the message from the President: "Sorry, folks, it had to be done, but believe me, I really meant it when I told you over and over that taxes on those making over $250,000 or $1 million needed to be raised by 3% - maybe next year or the year after that or...oh, and we had to cut social security, medicare, food stamps, education, and programs for the poor and homeless, but remember, we have a strong military program, and it's for the good of the country. The rich need that money so it will trickle down to you."
end of my rant...
Jun 7, 2012 4:46pm
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke Warns Congress on ‘Taxmaggedon’: ‘If You All Go on Vacation, It’s Still Going to Happen’
snip
The single biggest item making up the fiscal cliff, Bernanke said, is the potential expiration of the so-called Bush tax cuts. If everything else were held constant, he said, the expirations alone would have adverse effects on spending and growth in the economy that would be significant.
“I’m not necessarily saying that the right thing to do is to extend those cuts,” he added. “It could be there are other steps you could take that would have a similar impact. But that is the single biggest component of the so-called cliff.
Rep. Sean Duffy, R-Wis., asked if that basically meant, in essence, that the Fed chairman would advise that the tax cuts should be extended.
“I’d tell you to try to avoid a situation in which you have a massive cut in spending and increase in taxes all hitting at one moment, as opposed to trying to spread them out over time in some way that will … create less short-term drag on the U.S. economy,” Bernanke responded.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/06/fed-chairman-ben-bernanke-warns-congress-on-taxmaggedon-if-you-all-go-on
Cornyn doesn’t trust White House to 'investigate itself' over leaks
Source: The Hill
Republican Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) on Thursday repeated calls for a special counsel to investigate recent leaks of classified national-security operations, saying lawmakers should not trust the White House to “investigate itself.”
“The special counsel was created so that there should be a measure of independence in investigations like this where the natural tendency of the administration, when it’s the subject of the investigation, the natural tendency is to circle the wagons,” said Cornyn on CNN’s "Starting Point." “I don’t believe that Attorney General Holder or his deputy are going to be able to do a truly independent investigation.
“I don’t think we can just let the White House investigate itself or take its word for it that it’s not the source of these leaks,” he added.
Last week, leaks detailing a U.S. cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear program and President Obama’s “kill list” targeting al Qaeda operatives formed the basis for stories in The New York Times.
Read more: http://thehill.com/video/senate/231421-cornyn-doesnt-trust-white-house-to-investigate-itself-over-leaks
Leaks or citizens right to know what their government is doing?
The Price of Inequality and the Myth of Opportunity
sorry, didn't notice this excellent article has already been posted by marmar.
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