First Iceland, then the World

Written by Michael Collins

SOURCE: DailyCensored.com

Michael Collins
The public is angry. Why should the public pay for the bankers mistakes. Iceland blogger Halldor Sigurdsson

Who cleans up the mess when ignorant, greedy bankers rack up massive debt then go broke? The people of Iceland made a strong statement Saturday. The sins of big bankers and government regulators shouldn’t fall on the citizens. By a 93% to 2% margin, they voted down a proposal requiring them to cover bad debt incurred by one of the nation’s oldest and largest banks. Covering the debt would have cost Iceland’s 317,000 citizens around $17,000 each.

Iceland’s national referendum was the first opportunity for the people of any nation to vote directly on who pays when the financial elite fail.

As citizens voted, Iceland’s Prime Minister was dismissing the importance of the vote and promising to negotiate a payment scheme obligating citizen subsidies for bad debt created by Iceland’s beyond-bad bankers.

Press Release:

February 24, 2010

(Washington, D.C.)-U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen today called on WellPoint CEO Angela Braly to explain the increase in New Hampshire health insurance rates despite the company's substantial profits. According to a report released today by the Center for American Progress, WellPoint, under the banner of Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, intends to increase individual insurance rates in New Hampshire by 12 percent to 13 percent and has already increased premiums in the small group market by 17 percent. Meanwhile, the company posted a 700 percent increase in profits in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to the same time period the previous year.

Wall Street's Bailout Hustle

Goldman Sachs and other big banks aren't just pocketing the trillions we gave them to rescue the economy - they're re-creating the conditions for another crash

MATT TAIBBI

Posted Feb 17, 2010 5:57 AM

What's to be done? We the people have to take control of our money and cut out the middlemen.

• excessive force;

• sexual assaults;

• false arrest and fabrication of evidence;

• deprivation of property; and

• failure to keep from harm.

On second thought, there's probably too much verbiage to go above the fold, so let me just point out that my attention was first caught by the back cover of National Journal (Senator-elect Scott Brown is on the front) where some school teacher in Mecca, California is promoting "financial responsibility" by pointing to greenbacks pinned up on the wall. More apt than the engineers of this campaign probably intended.

What they intended seems pretty well encapsulated in the Introduction of the Currency of Progress Campaign:

Visa is celebrating how the power of digital currency is transforming lives with a new advertising campaign--Currency of Progress.

SOURCE: Alternet.org

BY Chris Hedges

The Obama Brand: Feel Good While Overlords Loot the Treasury and Launch Imperial Wars | Brand Obama makes us hopeful. We like our president and we believe he's like us. But we're being duped into doing a lot of things that are not in our interest.

January 25, 2010

Editor's Note: The following is an adapted excerpt from Chris Hedges' book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (Nation Books, 2009) that first appeared in Tikkun magazine.

Barack Obama is a brand. And the Obama brand is designed to make us feel good about our government while corporate overlords loot the Treasury, armies of corporate lobbyists grease the palms of our elected officials, our corporate media diverts us with gossip and trivia, and our imperial wars expand in the Middle East. Brand Obama is about being happy consumers. We are entertained. We feel hopeful. We like our president. We believe he is like us. But like all branded products spun out from the manipulative world of corporate advertising, this product is duping us into doing and supporting a lot of things that are not in our interest.

SOURCE: USA Today

Opposing view: TARP was a flop

Target relief to Main Street families and businesses, not big banks.

By Paul Hodes

A year ago, as our nation stood on the brink of economic collapse, Congress decided that to stabilize our financial system, we should spend $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks. I opposed this move. Some now claim that since our banking system averted collapse, the Troubled Asset Relief Program — TARP — must have been the right approach. Unfortunately, the results show the opposite.

When America spends taxpayer money, we need to make sure it is being spent right. But after sending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street with little accountability or oversight, we still haven't seen an increase in lending, we still face a massive foreclosure crisis and no one can say exactly where all the money went.

C.I.A. Said to End Blackwater Contract
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: December 11, 2009

WASHINGTON (AP) -- CIA Director Leon Panetta has canceled a contract with the former Blackwater security firm that allowed the company's operatives to load missiles on Predator drones in Pakistan.

Panetta canceled the contract earlier this year and the work is being shifted to government personnel, a person familiar with the contract said Friday. The person spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the classified program.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

SOURCE: Constitutional Accountability Center

As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, expected any day now, Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) has continued to build on the scholarly research discussed in our brief filed with the Court:  whether corporations have the same rights as individuals, particularly when it comes to influencing electoral politics in this country.

The result of this work is this discussion draft, tentatively titled “A Capitalist Joker”: Corporations, Corporate Personhood, and the Constitution, which we intend to release more formally in January as the latest installment in our Text & History Narrative Series.  The text of our Constitution never mentions corporations and, as our narrative explains, this was deliberate: the framers wrote and the American people ratified the original Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the three Civil War amendments — the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — to secure the inalienable rights of “We the People” — living human beings.   Governments create corporations and give them special privileges to fuel economic growth, but with these special privileges come greater government oversight.  Indeed, in the early 20th Century, the American people added the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments to the Constitution, at least in part, to ensure greater governmental control over corporations and less corporate influence over our democracy.

This is what happens when you privatize your government

BY Michael Collins

The Supreme Court of the United States will soon announce a major decision on our lightly controlled system of campaign funding. Will it retain some limitations on corporate influence or will the court blow the lid off and cause a perpetual flood of unrestricted corporate contributions?

An additional outcome may surprise and shock the public.

If the Supreme Court overturns the lower court's decision, foreign nationals, corporations, and governments with partial ownership of U.S. corporations will, in effect, end up contributing to and influencing U.S. candidates in federal elections.

The Supreme Court surprised many when it agreed to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that enforced key sections of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold) -- Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (FEC) (1) .

And yes, a whole bunch of Senators actually voted to continue contracting with companies prohibiting employee legal and civil rights

Sen. Franken Questions an Arbitration Lawyer about Binding Arbitration

SOURCE: Black Box Voting

You may have heard: There will be a hearing in the U.S. Senate about the ES&S monopolistic takeover of America's voting system. (ES&S bought Diebold's Premier Election Solutions, giving it control over 75% of our jurisdictions).

Here is a copy of the letter BLACK BOX VOTING has sent to every senator on the committee, and a downloadable do-it-yourself letter in Word format so you can edit and customize to your own liking and send your own, plus all the addresses, fax numbers and phone numbers.

LINK TO DO IT YOURSELF LETTER:

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/senate-hearing-doityourself-letter.doc

NEW RESEARCH

Note that the letter provides some new research to counteract claims that it's too late because the acquisition has already taken place, and that the acquisition doesn't fall under antitrust laws.

SOURCE: opednews.com

Vote of No Confidence in E-Voting Merger, Part Two: Talking with Democracy Warrior Nancy Tobi

By Joan Brunwasser (about the author)

We're back for the second part of the interview with Democracy Warrior Nancy Tobi. Can you walk us through Black Box Voting's anti-trust case, Nancy?

Black Box Voting's case is spectacular. Other objections we've heard about in the news from Hart Intercivic (another e-voting company), Senator Schumer, and Voter Action focus on the detrimental effect of the proposed merger on competitive markets in the e-voting industry. This is appropriate because the issue at hand is antitrust.

However, the Black Box Voting complaint takes things to a much deeper and more meaningful level. Their complaint points to the fact that the e-voting companies now control nearly the entire voting system, from poll book management to vote-casting and -counting to results tabulation. The complaint takes note of the unconstitutional nature of this privatization of what are supposed to be public elections, and specifically the concealment of the voting system processes from public oversight through the use of computer programs, which are not observable to the human eye.

Press Release:

Kaufman and Isakson Statement on Tomorrow's SEC Roundtable on Short Selling

September 29, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Sens. Ted Kaufman (D-DE) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) released the following statement in advance of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) roundtable on short selling tomorrow.

“Tomorrow’s SEC roundtable is long awaited, but it is clear that the panel is stacked against the need for restrictions on naked short selling. In the recent financial decline, there was abusive short selling enabled by the repeal of the 70-year-old uptick rule and a lack of so-called pre-borrow or hard locate requirements.