Publictakeover's Weblog

Job-Killing Korea Trade Deal

We’ve seen how So-called “Free Trade Agreements” ship American jobs overseas, to countries where corporations can pay workers a pittance, where workers have no rights or legal protections to organize, where there are few environmental restrictions or consumer protection laws.

This “deregulation” deprives citizens of rights they’ve worked for by designating the WTO or another global trade/banking office as arbiter of labor, environmental, human rights, monopoly and utility disputes in the countries that sign on.

Agreements like these are designed to enrich the bankers and 1% investor class while impoverishing everybody else, including future generations.

These trade deals must be stopped.

Watch: A Look at the Job-Killing Korea Trade Deal.

Rein in Wall Street and rescue the middle class | Bernie Sanders

Earlier today my friend showed me Paul Krugman’s latest commentary on the Sunday corporate pundits and their reflections on #OWS: Panic of the Plutocrats.

It includes all the soundbytes of the advertising vehicle we call the corporate media.

But the British Guardian was the only news outlet I know of to include this quotation in an editorial by Senator Bernie Sanders, member of the Senate Banking and Finance Committee.

Even Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke agreed when I questioned him this week at a joint economic committee hearing that that there was “excessive risk-taking” by Wall Street. Bernanke also said the protesters “with some justification” hold the financial sector responsible for “getting us into this mess”, and added, “I can’t blame them.”

That’s about as close to an endorsement of a political movement as I’ve ever heard from the lips of the current Federal Reserve chairman.

Occupy Wall St. handout

Somebody gave me this flier today. I was leaving the square on Wall St. in Zuccotti Park and Broadway and Liberty Sts. It provides some of the most lucid explanation of the movement.

Al Jazeera English on Drones

Ya know, the argument is that everybody has the right to a fair trial of their peers if they’re suspected of committing a crime.

On the traditional battlefield, this right was waived in a “trial by combat” in which “justice” would favor the stronger, more righteous combatant.

But now, the world or “Satan” uses the killer instinct to completely dethrone justice from the human consciousness. Killing is now justified on the basis of superior technology and propaganda.

In 2007, CIA director Michael Hayden began lobbying the White House for “permission to carry out strikes against houses or cars merely on the basis of behaviour that matched a ‘pattern of life’ associated with al-Qaeda or other groups.” And next thing you knew, they were moving from a few attempted targeted assassinations toward a larger air war of annihilation against types and “behaviours”.

Opinion – Al Jazeera English.

I don’t know about you, but it’s murder to use lethal weapons on people who have neither been arrested nor charged with crimes, isn’t it?

Just because we have the newsclout to scare everybody into thinking it’s okay, it’s not okay. It’s murder.

People say, “Well, it’s common practice now … you can’t stop it …”

Stop the murder of innocent people–murder in our name!

Stop the drones!

Occupy Wall Street

Here’s a nice, informative piece some indy put together on video.

Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.) from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.

Obama and child soldiers!

I would really like to share this with some people who are very important in my life. But this is so depressing that they’ll hold it against me.

Can’t you tell me about something positive? Why do you always want to tell me things that are do depressing?

President Barack Obama has decided to waive almost all the legally mandated penalties for countries that use child soldiers and provide those countries U.S. military assistance, just like he did last year.

The White House is expected to soon announce its decision to issue a series of waivers for the Child Soldiers Protection Act, a 2008 law that is meant to stop the United States from giving military aid to countries that recruit soldiers under the age of 15 and use them to fight wars. The administration has laid out a range of justifications for waiving penalties on Yemen, South Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which amount to a gutting of the law for the second year in a row

via Obama waives penalties on countries that employ child soldiers – again! – By Josh Rogin | The Cable.

Michael Moore @ Occupy Wall Street – YouTube

Michael Moore @ Occupy Wall Street – YouTube.

Obama’s Tax on Millionaires – Absent Honest Debate

This NY Times article by DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI, who’s supposedly a so-called liberal economics writer, is itself a complete explanation for why everyone in the current national discourse seems to be saying, “Raising taxes on the rich will kill jobs.”

Besides the President’s own advisor, National Economic Council deputy director Jason Furman, the article quotes John Boehner and Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, a professor at the University of Michigan and expert in international tax law, is supposedly the counterweight to “establishment” economic spokespersons.  His big contribution to the article is the international perspective, that a lot of other countries are raising income taxes on rich people, and that a guiding principal of taxation policy is rich people pay a higher effective rate than middle and lower class payors.

How radical!

Curtis Dubay, a senior policy analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said that job growth in the Clinton and Bush administrations followed reductions in capital gains taxes.That is what worries Mr. Dubay. The proposal could mean higher taxes on capital gains for the wealthy. “And that’s where investment and hiring starts,” he said.

Evidently, no one from the AFL-CIO, the unemployed, or the liberal think tanks such as Center for American Progress, Campaign for America’s Future, or the Economic Policy Institute has anything different to contribute to this “debate.”

The New York Times again demonstrates itself to be an exclusive, establishment mouthpiece, especially in matters of economics and government policy.  As the paper of record, its mission is to marginalize progressive, liberal voices and shift all policy debate as far as possible to the conservative positions.

The Times presents the illusion of being objective because it presents a range of opinions, but the range it presents does not include leftists, such as Dick Wolff or Dean Baker.

There is no questioning of the premises behind the idea of taxation, other than a vague reference to “mistrust of government.” There is no mention that the government is the instrument of the sovereign people, collectively, and that the People thus enable all accumulation of wealth by allowing and protecting ownership of private property, rather than claiming it all themselves, like a King. Furthermore, wealth is produced from the collective resources and socio-economic conditions historically provided by a specific society, not by an individual who invents everything from scratch.

These, and other socialist and reasonable economic concepts are thus kept out of the debate–and the consciousness–of the American people. Ultimately, anyone heard to offer a viewpoint that isn’t within the narrow mainstream parameters of the New York Times is thought to be an irresponsible, radical idealist.

via Obama’s Tax on Millionaires – NYTimes.com.

Secret Wars (Reprise)

Stars and Stipes is reporting that AFRICOM wants more special operations counter terrorism forces deployed. They are picking up intelligence that a lot of Africans want to attack “us” in one way or another.

they have publicly voiced intent to target the U.S. and are gaining capacity to attack U.S. interests.

said Army Gen. Carter Ham, commander of U.S. Africa Command.

What gets me about this is the same old story: who is to say what are “U.S. interests?” AFRICOM? The Pentagon? They don’t have even as much credibility as The Debt Commission.

There is no democracy in American Federal government any more, and wealthy, destructive special interests are enriching themselves and destroying everybody else with the reins of power they’ve wrested from the people.

What a payday lays in store for Halliburton, Xe, DuPont and Boeing if AFRICOM can contract out the business of protecting U.S. interests there.

Manufacturers lobby against deeper defense cuts – Yahoo!

Talk about over-the-top.

“American leadership in aerospace and defense is being threatened by forces in Congress and the administration,” the association said.

The article goes on to state later that Defense spending has nearly tripled since 9/11, not including the 1+ trillion for the wars.

My complaint isn’t that the deficit reduction committee is going after (in a mild manner of speaking) the Pentagon, but that they’re not going after the so-called black budgets.

via the AP, Donna Cassata Yahoo!.