Getting re-acquainted with an old friend

jazzfm is a london jazz station that i used to listen to a lot back in 2001-2002... then, for some reason, they started blocking their url in the u.s. so i just gave it up... a couple of days ago, i looked them up and have been listening and enjoying once again... we'll see if accessing their url is still a problem when i get back to the u.s...

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Anonymous killing from 10,000 miles away

yeah, ok... so much for my saturday break from the news...

robert greenwald...


Sign the petition to stop drone strikes and other extrajudicial killings at
http://rethinkafghanistan.com.

the whole drone, targeted assassination, extrajudicial killing thing really grinds my ass...

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Saturday photoblogging - Prishtina, Kosovo

yes, it's been a while since i've popped up with any moon or sunset pics...


Full moon in the east


Full moon close-up


Sunset in the west

all taken around 4:40 p.m. central european time...

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Taking a Saturday break

last friday, i bused down to macedonia for the weekend to visit friends... saturday was a gorgeous day and we hiked in the mountains followed by a wonderful dinner of fresh trout in a mountain restaurant... it was a great way to clear out the cobwebs and refresh myself after a week of unaccustomed office work...

this weekend, i'm hanging out in the apartment here in prishtina and just can't get my head around all the unpleasant news that never stops pouring forth from my intertubes... yeah, i'm reading it but i can't seem to work up the motivation to post any of it, certainly not when it's the same ol', same ol'...

i'm also trying to wrap my head around the fact that this coming thursday is thanksgiving... last thanksgiving, i had come from here in kosovo to visit macedonian friends and cooked them a genuine american thanksgiving dinner... where does the time go, eh...?

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We ask that you allow tax cuts on incomes over $1,000,000 to expire at the end of this year as scheduled

well, well, well... whaddaya know... millionaires are stepping up for fiscal responsibility...

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength

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The prosecution of the global war on terrorism: in this season of Thanksgiving, let’s thank the courts.

a thoughtful nyt op-ed from linda greenhouse, well worth reading...

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Atrios is becoming increasingly strident

which, overall, i find to be a very good thing... he's been very measured in his blogging but i think he's now seeing some realities that others of us have seen for quite some time... honestly, they're almost impossible to avoid at this stage of the game...

the following squibs are just from yesterday...

item...

The amazing thing about the banksters is that despite all we've done for them, and continue to do, many of them are still probably basically insolvent.

item...

I wouldn't be repeating myself so much on what the administration has done wrong if they'd signal some way forward. They haven't.

item...

Treasury has done nothing, the OCC has done nothing. There is no accountability for the rich and powerful whatsoever.

item...

All the banksters are utterly corrupt, including the ones we partially own, the regulators don't know anything and don't care, and this is the system Treasury has put its faith in.

i consider it somewhat of a victory for a moderate, widely-read blogger like atrios to become increasingly strident and shrill... our country is being utterly ravaged by our super-rich elites and we desperately need more folks to speak up...

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Terrorism and torture: a presumption of innocence for the powerful but not for anybody else

tom engelhardt...

The presumption of innocence may be slowly dying in the courtrooms where our terror trials are being held, as Karen Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at NYU Law School and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days, points out in today’s post. Here’s the curious thing, though: that presumption is stronger than ever when it comes to those who once ran or carried out the Global War on Terror. Afghanistan to Washington, Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, they all continue to live within a bubble of official innocence.

karen greenberg...

Guilty Until Proven Guilty
Threatening the Presumption of Innocence

[...]

Since September 12, 2001, Americans have been systematically cowed to a degree that is hard to grasp, and the justice system in this country has in no way been inoculated from this virus. If you need a measure of which way the currents of politics are running today, start with the political calculation that the Obama administration has had to make when it comes to the trial of KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed], which has only grown that much more difficult in the wake of the Ghailani verdict.

So, too, for those of us who favor civilian trials. How do we really feel about having been put in a position where, to defend the merits of the system of justice, we feel compelled to equate certain conviction with the notion of success?

The deepest principle of American justice is being tested, right now in Washington, in lower Manhattan in the wake of the Ghailani verdict, and elsewhere. With terrorism trials, the more serious they get, the more the presumption of innocence seems to lie at the mercy of politics.

it's really a very vicious circle... when you capture, detain, torture and hold presumed terrorists for years without charges or trial, you are going to look even worse than you already do when they finally do come to trial and are subsequently acquitted so you better make damn sure the verdict is guilty, whether it's a civilian or a military trial... the implications of that for a fair, jury of your peers-based justice system underpinned by the principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is frightening to contemplate... the sad reality is that "contemplation" at this stage of reality is just wishful thinking...

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More on Ghailani: Bush and Cheney had him acquitted

juan cole...

This is how George W. Bush and Dick Cheney got Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, suspected of involvement in the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998, off hundreds of murder charges: They had him tortured.

Ghailani was convicted Wednesday of conspiracy to damage US government property, for which he could well face life imprisonment, but was acquitted of murder charges stemming from the deaths caused by the blowing up of the embassies.

The US right wing is jumping up and down and denouncing Attorney General Eric Holder for trying Ghailani in a civilian court instead of in a military tribunal, and implying that he got off because civilian law is more lax than that of the tribunals would have been.

For instance, Rep. Peter T. King (R-NY) thundered, “This tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama administration’s decision to try Al Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts.” King, defended Bush’s commitment to torturing people, saying “Bush deserves credit for what he did.” King should be aware that advocating war crimes itself was considered a crime at the Nuremberg trials.

In fact, the government case against Ghailani was undermined precisely by Bush and Cheney and their foaming-at-the-mouth supporters on the Right, which increasingly deserves to be called simply American Fascism. The case was undermined by the use of torture.

i was just listening to npr news where the newscasters and commentators took the tack that the whole deal was the result of holding a civilian trial... when will we be able to shake off this horrendous, manipulative, constitution-undermining propaganda...?

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The Ghailani trial outcome a la Glenn: "One either believes in the American system of justice or one does not"

i count on glenn's clear thinking and his ability to explain some of the most complex issues in terms even a legal dumbass like me can understand...

[E]ven had [Ghailani] been acquitted on all counts, the Obama administration had made clear that it would simply continue to imprison him anyway under what it claims is the President's "post-acquittal detention power" -- i.e., when an accused Terrorist is wholly acquitted in court, he can still be imprisoned indefinitely by the U.S. Government under the "law of war" even when the factual bases for the claim that he's an "enemy combatant" (i.e. that he blew up the two embassies) are the same ones underlying the crimes for which he was fully acquitted after a full trial.

[...]

But the most important point here is that one either believes in the American system of justice or one does not. When a reviled defendant is acquitted in court, and torture-obtained evidence is excluded, that isn't proof that the justice system is broken; it's proof that it works. A "justice system" which guarantees convictions -- or which allows the Government to rely on evidence extracted from torture -- isn't a justice system at all, by definition.

our justice system was set UP to work and, even with its imperfections, it DOES work...

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The will of the population is quite different from the policy of our ruling elites

paul jay of real news talks with noam chomsky about the utter and total negation of the will of the people in favor of agendas defined by our super-rich elites...

real news via common dreams...



once again, chomsky can help us to see through the propaganda and manipulation that inundates our daily consciousness...

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There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. Victory goes to the falsifiers.

dahlia lithwick on obama's eschewing of any accountability for our nation's criminal behavior...

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

scott horton in harper's...

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

i've been posting about accountability - more specifically, the lack thereof - since i started this blog in 2005 (see google's 97 hits here) and we're still not seeing any...

(above courtesy of information clearing house...)

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Was the health industry ready to put out a hit on Michael Moore?

as abhorrent as this revelation is, it certainly shouldn't be surprising... we've known - or at least seriously suspected - that our ruling, super-rich elites will stop at nothing to maintain their choke hold on money and power... if the full list of all the horrific deeds perpetrated by these ruthless brigands ever comes to light, pushing michael moore off a cliff will probably be closer to the category of "tame"...

from michael moore...

Wednesday, November 17th, 2010

Friends,

Yesterday, on the TV and radio show "Democracy Now" hosted by Amy Goodman, the former Vice President of CIGNA, one of the nation's largest health insurance companies, revealed that CIGNA met with the other big health insurers to hatch a plan to "push" yours truly "off a cliff."

The interview contains new revelations about just how frightened the health industry was that "Sicko" might ignite a public wave of support for "socialized medicine." So the large health insurance companies came together over a common cause: Stop the American people from going to see "Sicko" -- and the way to do that was to cause some form of harm to me (either personally, professionally or...physically?).

Take a look at this stunning section of the interview with Wendell Potter:

WENDELL POTTER [former executive, CIGNA]: ...We were concerned that the movie ["Sicko"] would be as successful as "Fahrenheit 9/11" had been. And we knew that if it were, it really would change public opinion about our health care system in ways that would be harmful to the profits of health insurers. So, it was very important for this [attack] campaign to succeed. At one point during a strategy meeting, one of the people from [the insurance companies' public relations firm] APCO said that if our efforts, our initial efforts, were not successful, then we'd have to move to an element of the campaign to push Michael Moore off a cliff. And not meaning to do that literally, but to—

AMY GOODMAN: Are you sure?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I'm not sure. To tell you the truth, when I started doing what I'm doing [as a whistleblower], I was concerned about my own health and well-being, maybe just from paranoia. But these companies play to win. And we're talking about some big bucks at stake here—billions and billions and billions of dollars.

AMY GOODMAN: So what were they talking about when they said, "If this doesn't work, we're going to push him off the cliff"?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, it would be just an incredibly intense PR effort, if necessary, to spend more premium dollars to defame Michael Moore, to discredit him even more as a filmmaker.

AMY GOODMAN: So, were you doing research on him?

WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: You were going—personally?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, I was a part of the effort. I didn't—that was part of the reason for hiring APCO and to work with a trade association, is that it relieved me of the responsibility of doing that kind of work. You paid for it to be done by people who were experts in doing that kind of research.

AMY GOODMAN: But they were doing an investigation into him personally?

WENDELL POTTER: Well, absolutely. We knew as much about him probably as he knows about himself.

AMY GOODMAN: About his wife, about his kid, about—

WENDELL POTTER: Oh, yeah. You know, it's important to know everything that you might be able to use in some kind of a campaign against someone, to discredit them professionally and often personally.

AMY GOODMAN: And did you use that?

WENDELL POTTER: You use it if necessary.

The interview goes on as Potter reveals how his front group was able to get its talking points and smears into stories in the New York Times and CNN. It is a chilling look inside how easy it is to manipulate our mainstream media -- and just how worried the health insurance companies were that the American people might demand a true universal health care system.

In particular, Potter talks about how they may have succeeded in influencing CNN to run a factually untrue story about "Sicko" by its reporter, Sanjay Gupta (which led to my infamous encounter with Wolf Blitzer and later, an apology from CNN for getting their facts wrong).

Potter believes his work to defame "Sicko" succeeded, as the film didn't end up posting "Fahrenheit 9/11" grosses. To be clear, "Sicko" went on to become the 3rd largest grossing documentary of all time at that point. And as the release of "Sicko" in June of 2007 was the first time since the defeat of Hillary Clinton's healthcare bill in 1994 that the issue of health insurance was brought to the forefront of the national media, I believe it helped to reignite the issue during the 2008 election year by exposing millions of Americans to the truth about the health insurance industry. More than one person on Capitol Hill will admit that "Sicko" was a big help in rallying public support for the compromise bill that eventually passed earlier this year. But I agree, their smear campaign was effective and did create the dent they were hoping for -- single payer and the public option never even made it into the real discussion on the floor of Congress.

(There was really only one reason "Sicko" didn't sell as many tickets as "Fahrenheit" and that was because of a felony that was committed -- a felony that I will discuss for the first time on this site in the coming weeks or months ahead. Stay tuned.)

Please read or watch the entire interview with Wendell Potter. It's a fascinating peek behind the curtain of how corporate America really runs this country. And how if any of us get in their way, then those people must be stopped. It begs the question: Seeing how there's more of us than there are of them, how long will we let their takeover of our democracy continue?

God Bless the Ruling Class,
Michael Moore

surprising...? no, not really...

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Incentivizing bad bankster behavior

it's hard for me to accept that we're actually having a debate about holding crooks accountable... otoh, why should we hold the bankers accountable when our elected leaders flout the constitution with impunity...?

Failing to prosecute Wall Street’s high-flying crooks doesn’t only represent a great miscarriage of justice. Powerful voices within the economic establishment are now making the case that holding the bankers criminally culpable is necessary if we ever hope to stop our national economy from moving from one speculation-driven bubble to the next.

Nobel-prize winner Joe Stiglitz recently told AOL’s Daily Finance that major damage resulting from the financial disaster “has not really been taken on board, and that is confidence in our legal system, in our rule of law, in our system of justice.” His prescription? “I think we ought to go do what we did” in the wake of similar financial crises in the past, and “actually put many of these guys in prison.”

His argument is based not on the visceral satisfaction of seeing the high and mighty brought down a peg, but on cold economic grounds. At heart, economics is the study of incentives, and by refusing to hold the corporate criminals at the heart of the housing crisis accountable in any meaningful way, we’re creating powerful incentives for more malfeasance in the future.

As Stiglitz explained, “People have an incentive sometimes to behave badly, because they can make more money if they can cheat. If our economic system is going to work then we have to make sure that what they gain when they cheat is offset by a system of penalties.” With those penalties amounting to a small 5 percent or 10 percent tax on illegal profits, what’s to stop the crooks? “You're still sitting home pretty with your several hundred million dollars that you have left over after paying fines,” Stiglitz said.

why should the banksters be held accountable when our ex-president is going around bragging that he authorized torture...?

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TSA and sexual harassment

unfortunately, i've GOT to fly... oh, well...

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We are dealing with shameless demagogy - the financial End Time has arrived

michael hudson in counterpunch via alternet...

We are dealing with shameless demagogy. The financial End Time has arrived, but Mr. Obama’s happy-talk pretends that “two years” will get us through the current debt-induced depression. The Republican plan is to make more Congressional and Senate gains in 2012 as Mr. Obama’s former supporters “vote with their backsides” and stay home, as they did earlier this month. So “two years” means forever in politician-talk. Why vote for a politician who promises “change” but is merely an exclamation mark for the Bush-Cheney policies from Afghanistan and Iraq to Wall Street’s Democratic Leadership Council on the party’s right wing? One of its leaders, after all, was Mr. Obama’s Senate mentor, Joe Lieberman.

The second pretense is that cutting taxes for the super-rich is necessary to win Republican support for including the middle class in the tax cuts. It is as if the Democrats never won a plurality in Congress. (One remembers George W. Bush with his mere 50+%, pushing forward his extremist policies on the logic that: “I’ve got capital, and I’m using it.” What he had, of course, was Democratic Leadership Committee support.) The pretense is “to create jobs,” evidently to be headed by employment of shipyard workers to build yachts for the nouveau riches and sheriff’s deputies to foreclose on the ten million Americans whose mortgage payments have fallen into arrears.

hudson engages in a re-naming exercise that is sadly appropriate...

The National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform might better be called the New Class War Commission to Scale Back Social Security and Medicare Payments to Labor in Order to Leave more Tax Revenue Available to Give Away to the Super-Rich.

and sums up the situation in a most sobering fashion...

Mr. Obama’s appointees are turning the U.S. economy into a Permanent Emergency, a Perpetual Ponzi Scheme requiring injections of more and more Quantitative Easing to to rescue “the economy” (Mr. Obama’s euphemism for creditors at the top of the economic pyramid) from being pushed into insolvency. Mr. Bernanke’s helicopter flies only over Wall Street. It does not drop monetary relief on the population at large.

naturally, being a u.s. citizen, i am focused more on what's happening in my own country... however, as someone who also spends a great deal of time outside the u.s., i can state with certainty that this same scenario - the super-rich elites looting every last molecule of the world's natural and financial resources - is being played out in every country i have had the pleasure of visiting...

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We have to have a war to hold Khalid Sheikh Mohammed without a trial and have to hold KSM to continue to have a war

oh, ow... ouch, ow, ow... my head hurts...

marcy...

[T]he AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force] just became a forever war–at least one lasting the next twenty to forty years of KSM’s life. Because the government has apparently decided to hold KSM with no more solid legal justification than the war, which judges have interpreted to be the AUMF. Which means the government is going to have to sustain some claim that that AUMF remains in effect, even if we go broke and withdraw from Afghanistan as a result (that seems to be the only thing that will make us withdraw, in spite of the fact that we’re not going to do any good there).

[...]

The decision to hold KSM indefinitely has now flipped that equation: so long as the only justification for holding KSM is the claim we’re at war, we’ll have to remain at war.

And all those bonus powers a President gets with the claim that we’re at war? They’re all wrapped up now, in the necessity to hold KSM forever.

oh, ouch... make the bad man stop...

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WTC Building 7

are we finally closing in on the truth...?

geraldo...



BuildingWhat?

More than eight years after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, New York Supreme Court Justice Edward H. Lehner was hearing arguments in a courtroom less than a mile from Ground Zero about a ballot initiative to launch a new investigation of the 9/11 attacks. When the lawyer for the plaintiffs sponsoring the initiative explained that the 9/11 Commission report left many unanswered questions, including “Why did Building 7 come down,” the Judge replied quizzically, “Building what?”

Like Judge Lehner, millions of people do not know or remember only vaguely that a third tower called World Trade Center Building 7 also collapsed on September 11, 2001. In any other situation, the complete, free fall collapse of a 47-story skyscraper would be played over and over on the news. It would be discussed for years to come and building design codes would be completely rewritten. So, why does no one know about Building 7? And why did Building 7 come down?

The answers to these questions have far-reaching implications for our society. The goal of the “BuildingWhat?” campaign is to raise awareness of Building 7 so that together we can begin to address these questions.

i ain't holding my breath but any step in the direction of truth is welcomed...

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You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning

from grit tv via information clearing house...

"We have a choice," says Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Chris Hedges. "You can either be complicit in your own enslavement or you can lead a life that has some kind of integrity and meaning." Hedges argues for moral responsibility in a world bankrupt of it, and discusses the downfall of what he refers to as the liberal class in his newest book. From World War I to the present, he traces the rise and fall of liberal values, and paints a grim portrait of the future.

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Continuing systemic damage to everyone EXCEPT our super-rich elites

frank rich...

The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 — up from less than 9 percent in 1976. During the boom years of 2002 to 2007, that top 1 percent’s pretax income increased an extraordinary 10 percent every year. But the boom proved an exclusive affair: in that same period, the median income for non-elderly American households went down and the poverty rate rose.

It’s the very top earners, not your garden variety, entrepreneurial multimillionaires, who will be by far the biggest beneficiaries if there’s an extension of the expiring Bush-era tax cuts for income over $200,000 a year (for individuals) and $250,000 (for couples). The resurgent G.O.P. has vowed to fight to the end to award this bonanza, but that may hardly be necessary given the timid opposition of President Obama and the lame-duck Democratic Congress.

On last Sunday’s “60 Minutes,” Obama was already wobbling toward another “compromise” in which he does most of the compromising. It’s a measure of how far he’s off his game now that a leader who once had the audacity to speak at length on the red-hot subject of race doesn’t even make the most forceful case for his own long-held position on an issue where most Americans still agree with him. (Only 40 percent of those in the Nov. 2 exit poll approved of an extension of all Bush tax cuts.) The president’s argument against extending the cuts for the wealthiest has now been reduced to the dry accounting of what the cost would add to the federal deficit. As he put it to CBS’s Steve Kroft, “the question is — can we afford to borrow $700 billion?”

That’s a good question, all right, but it’s not the question. The bigger issue is whether the country can afford the systemic damage being done by the ever-growing income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else, whether poor, middle class or even rich. That burden is inflicted not just on the debt but on the very idea of America — our Horatio Alger faith in social mobility over plutocracy, our belief that our brand of can-do capitalism brings about innovation and growth, and our fundamental sense of fairness. Incredibly, the top 1 percent of Americans now have tax rates a third lower than the same top percentile had in 1970.

and NOBODY - absolutely NOBODY - is poised to exert ANY leadership whatsoever to reverse this disastrous course...

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