Show Posts

This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.

Topics - Universe Prince

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6 7 ... 15

3DHS / "Change You Can See"

« on: November 02, 2008, 09:25:23 PM »

Excerpted from http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10312008.html:

The disadvantages of the McCain-Pailin ticket don't need much explication. McCain has never risen to the challenge of the world financial crisis and this failure has shrivelled his chances to near invisibility. Though Sarah Pailin has enough horse sense to attack Wall Street greed, it's a brave and foolish soul who would argue that she will ever be ready to run the country, which in the unlikely event of Republican victory she might well have to do. So we're left with Obama-Biden.

Biden need not detain us. In his single person is combined everything that is loathsome about the Democratic Party. He’s a phony through and through, serf of the credit companies and virtually incapable of opening his mouth without unleashing a falsehood, a plagiarism or an absurdity. On his criminal record are the bankruptcy bill, many horrible statutes prosecuting the war on drugs, the crime bill.

And Obama? Here are some excerpts from what I wrote about him recently in The Nation.

[...]

"In substantive terms Obama’s run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, a negation achieved with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Abroad, Obama stands for imperial renaissance. He has groveled before the Israel lobby and pandered to the sourest reflexes of the cold war era. At home he has crooked the knee to bankers and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, the big agricultural combines. He is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing the powerful." I suggested that for a souvenir of what a progressive platform might look like people might consult Ralph’s website, or – at least for those portions about foreign policy and constitutional rights, Bob Barr.

Listening to my complaints about Obama, a friend of mine in New York asked what alternative I had to recommend her. Since in New York the split for Obama-Biden is roughly 65-29 I told her it didn't matter. She could write in the straight Wiccan ticket if she felt so inclined. (Not a bad platform either, as she duly reminded me: "Do as you will, as long as it harms none.") It wouldn't make any difference, any more than it would in California, where you can vote for Nader or Barr or McKinney and Obama is going to win regardless. In most states in the Union you can write in the Bertie Wooster/Jeeves ticket, and even without your vote Obama-Biden will canter home. So get out there and have fun and don’t feel excessively burdened by responsibility to History – always a left-wing failing.

And wouldn't Barr be the first mustachioed occupant of the White House since Teddy Roosevelt? Even if you don’t like the man, vote the mustache! This would be change we can see. Does that phrase have a vaguely familiar ring? It was what LBJ used to advise his staff during the Great Society build-up: "You've gotta give them change they can see." Meaning bridges, roads, new parks. Apparently the Obama pre-transition team is studying the early days of the New Deal and Great Society programs as thematic precursors for their initial two years -- before they lose one house of Congress, I suppose. I like freshman Montana Senator John Tester’s notion of change we’d like to see. Tester said people "want to see the executives that drove Wall Street into the ground in orange suits picking up cans along the side of the road." He’s got a hugely popular reception for that thought.

It's an interesting opinion piece. Check it out.

3DHS / Afghanistan leaders learn from the leadership of the U.S.?

« on: October 30, 2008, 02:11:21 PM »

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0819/p06s02-wosc.html

In fact, the Afghan government is responsible for at least 23 of the 45 reported incidents of intimidation, violence, or arrest of journalists between May 2007 and May 2008, according to the Nai Center for Open Media, an Afghan nongovernmental organization.

The figure represents a 130 percent spike from the same period the year before, when just 10 cases were reported. Since May, 22 incidents of press harassment have been reported, nearly a 60 percent jump from the same period last summer.

[...]

The Afghan government maintains that it respects freedom of speech and that journalists are only arrested or forced out of jobs when they violate the media code of conduct. "There are some circles [in the government] that would like to restrict media freedoms, but also some journalists who violate the principles of their profession," says Afghan Vice President Karim Khalili.

Abdul Wakhil Omari, a senior official at the Afghan Supreme Court, adds, "Of course it would be best if journalists weren't arrested, but they shouldn't overstep their bounds, either."

National security versus press freedom

Some officials argue that these bounds are crossed when critical reporting weakens the central government and strengthens the Taliban. They point out that given present security conditions reporters also have an obligation to protect the national interest.

"The media does not reflect the achievements of the government," Sadeq Mudaber, the deputy director of general policy, told reporters in November. "Although the media law guarantees freedom of press, the national interests of the country should be a priority over anything else."

3DHS / Hugo Chavez, (NOT) a champion of human rights

« on: October 28, 2008, 12:13:28 AM »

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22033

On September 18, we released a report in Caracas that shows how President Hugo Chavez has undermined human rights guarantees in Venezuela. That night, we returned to our hotel and found around twenty Venezuelan security agents, some armed and in military uniform, awaiting us outside our rooms. They were accompanied by a man who announced—with no apparent sense of irony—that he was a government "human rights" official and that we were being expelled from the country.

With government cameramen filming over his shoulder, the official did his best to act as if he were merely upholding the law. When we said we needed to gather our belongings, he calmly told us not to worry, his men had already entered our rooms and "packed" our bags.

[...]

Why did Chavez do it? One Brazilian on the plane on which we were forced to leave Venezuela offered a view that is increasingly widespread throughout Latin America: "Chavez is crazy." But the human rights defenders we work with in Venezuela have drawn a far more sobering conclusion. Chavez, in their view, was sending a deliberate message to his fellow countrymen: he will not allow human rights guarantees to get in his way, no matter what the rest of the world may think.

3DHS / Something for nothing

« on: October 28, 2008, 12:07:55 AM »

Economist Robin Hanson of George Mason University puts it this way:

Given how much less respect and deference economists get on most policy topics, relative to docs, physicists, or generals, I'm surprised to see some economists just got away with this sort of thing. The US has given top government economists, such as Paulson and Bernanke, well over a trillion in mostly blank checks to spend saving their Wall Street friends from ruin, supposedly to prevent another great depression. But it seems economists looking today at the data available then just can't find clear evidence a massive buyout was needed.

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/10/trust-us.html

3DHS / cowardly Chinese government gives in to "Enemies of the People" farmers

« on: October 23, 2008, 01:44:20 PM »

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article4975695.ece

Anxious at the spreading unrest among farmers left behind in the rush to get rich, China’s Communist Party leaders yesterday unveiled sweeping reforms to give its 730 million or more rural residents more say in what they do with their land.

[...]

Approved at a twice-a-year plenum of the party’s Central Committee earlier this month, the scheme will allow farmers to transfer their land-use rights and to join share-holding entities with their farmland. The policies, still lacking in crucial details, effectively give farmers – rather than village leaders – the authority to decide how to use their land.

[...]

Public ownership of land is a fundamental tenet of Communist Party rule and any attempt to enshrine farmers’ ownership of their plots provokes howls of anger from Marxist ideologists. However, the current system of 30-year leases that can be extended gives effective ownership while maintaining the fig-leaf of public control – but has created a system rife with abuse.

Under the new rules, severe punishment would be meted out to anyone violating farmers’ interests.

The farmers want more control over their land to protect them from abuse. Huh. Who would have guessed? I guess China will break down into anarchy and chaos now. And yes, I am being sarcastic.

3DHS / Libertarians and reality

« on: October 17, 2008, 03:45:14 PM »

Quote from: Xavier_Onassis on October 16, 2008, 12:26:56 AM

Libertarians are not living in reality. Most people realize this. That's why the Ron Paul Reloveution or whatever it was went nowhere.

http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2008/10/17/ron_paul_in_2012/index.html

Ron Paul appeared on CNN's American Morning on Friday, pushing the same apocalyptic message he served up during the Republican primaries, with one difference. His prediction of doom makes a heck of a lot more sense now than it did then.

"This system that we've had since 1971 is nonviable," he said. "and it's coming to an end."

That's what this whole story is about, the end of a monetary system that we've had since 1971. And something has to give. You just can't create more money out of thin air and propping up everybody.

It's an immoral system. You're asking the poor people to bail out the rich. You're asking the innocent people to bail out the guilty. You're asking people to just totally defy the Constitution because there's no place in the Constitution that says that we can do these things.

And, besides, economically, it's a disaster. This is going to cause a great deal of harm. It's like a drug addict taking a strong fix, and he feels better for a day or two. But believe me, we're going to kill the patient. And the patient here is the dollar system and our entire world economy.

Yeah, "pragmatism" has worked so well. The economy is not in crisis because of all the "pragmatism". All those folks who "live in reality" have done such a bang up job. Corporate welfare is out the wazoo. Government paternalism in the "war on poverty" and the "war on drugs" is so "successful". And "pragmatism" has brought us to choosing between a naive fool and power hungry geezer to lead the country as President. Is that "living in reality"? Seems a bit more like living in denial. So yeah libertarians don't live in denial.

3DHS / Want health insurance? Go get some.

« on: October 14, 2008, 07:10:59 PM »

http://reason.tv/video/show/560.html

"Call it the Gillespie Plan: If you want health insurance, get some."

(Sorry, it's not YouTube, so I can't find a way to embed it here.)

3DHS / on the roots of the economic crisis and the nature of the bailout

« on: October 14, 2008, 06:36:20 PM »

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEniEYD59EE[/youtube]
George Mason University economist Russell Roberts talks about how we got to where we are and where the federal government bailout plan will take us.

3DHS / Don't Vote (Rational Ignorance Remix)

« on: October 14, 2008, 05:25:20 PM »

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Lj54edyUk[/youtube]

3DHS / in defense of Milton Friedman

« on: September 28, 2008, 09:57:25 PM »

http://www.reason.com/news/show/128903.html

Exhibit A against Friedman is a quote from what Klein calls "one of his most influential essays": "Only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." This, says Klein, is "the shock doctrine." In a not-very-subtle short film based on the book, the quote appears over images of prisoners being tortured.

The quote is not, in fact, from one of Friedman's most influential essays; it's from a very brief introduction to a reprint of his book Capitalism and Freedom. And it is not a rationale for welcoming disasters; it's about the uncontroversial fact that people change their minds when the old ways seem to fail. Friedman provides a telling example, which Klein neglects to quote: Young Americans joined him in opposing the military draft after the Vietnam War forced them to risk their lives on another continent.

[...]

Klein twists this relationship beyond recognition, claiming Pinochet's 1973 coup was executed to allow free market economists ("the Chicago Boys," as the economists from Friedman's University of Chicago were called) to enact their reforms. This false link is crucial for giving the impression that the Friedmanites have blood on their hands, since the most violent period of the regime came right after the coup. But Friedman's visit, which Klein claims started the real transformation, came two years later. Klein insists on having it both ways.

[...]

The strangest thing about Klein's suggestion that crises benefit free markets and limited government is that there is such a long record of the exact opposite. World War I led to communism in Russia; economic depression gave us Nazi Germany. Wars and other disasters are rarely friends of freedom. On the contrary, politicians and government officials often use crises as an opportunity to increase their budgets and powers. As one prominent economist put it while explaining his opposition to war in Iraq: "War is a friend of the state....In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do." The economist? Milton Friedman.

Friedman was right about the Iraq war: The Bush administration has used that conflict and the larger War on Terror to dramatically expand the federal government's powers and expenditures. Bizarrely, Klein points to the U.S. after 9/11 as a major illustration of her thesis. She claims the terrorist attacks gave the Bush administration an opportunity to implement Friedman's ideas by benefiting friends in the defense and security industries with new contracts and unprecedented sums of money. Klein never clearly explains how this could possibly be Friedmanite. In the real world, Friedman "had always emphasized waste in defense spending and the danger to political freedom posed by militarism," in the words of his biographer Lanny Ebenstein. Somehow, Klein has confused Friedman's limited-government liberalism with corporatism.

[...]

In the absence of serious arguments against free markets, we are left with Klein's reasonable critiques of torture, dictatorships, corruption, and corporate welfare. In essence, her book says that Milton Friedman's limited government ideals are bad because governments are incompetent, corrupt, and cruel. If there is a disaster here, it is not one of Friedman's making.

3DHS / Taking Revenge on the Rich Will Not Bring Recovery

« on: September 22, 2008, 03:29:21 AM »

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122186507676758669.html

Police short sales and block them, says Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox. Fire the SEC chairman, says John McCain. Investigate those short sellers, say state attorneys general. Hold hearings to grill Wall Streeters says Nancy Pelosi. "Fire the whole Trickle-Down, On-Your-Own, Look-the-Other-Way crowd" says Barack Obama, and "get rid of this whole do-nothing approach to our economic problems." The Democratic presidential candidate wants public affirmation of his argument that the whole free-market philosophy of economics has been wrong.

Some of this talk carries an implicit suggestion: Do what I say or we will have another Great Depression. And no wonder: This September feels a lot like autumn 1929.

But there's an important fallacy here. The stock market crash of October 1929 and the Great Depression were not the same thing. What made the depression great was not magnitude but duration -- the fact that unemployment was still 20% 10 years later. In the 1930s, policies like the ones described above did not speed recovery; they impeded it.

Not long after the market crashed to 199 from its 381 high at the end of the summer of 1929, President Herbert Hoover turned on short sellers. Like our SEC, he demanded a curb on short sales. "Bear raids" or "bear parties" were to be stopped; the blame for the crash all belonged to "certain gentlemen."

[...]

But like today's politicians, Roosevelt also used the downturn as a weapon to trash markets generally. The New Dealers even used the same mocking phrases Mr. Obama does today. The rich might think that wealth trickled down, Roosevelt's speechwriter Sam Rosenman would later note, but "Roosevelt believed that prosperity did not 'trickle' that way."

[...]

In these years, the market was trying to recover, but prosecutors and tax collectors kept getting in the way. Mrs. Pelosi might note that even after the Pecora Commission finally completed its hearings, unemployment was still 20% rather than 10%.

[...]

A desperate Treasury Secretary Morgenthau traveled to New York to placate a crowd of 1,000 economists and businessmen at the Hotel Astor in November, 1937. The audience laughed at him for daring to try. By the next year the New Dealers were quietly telling themselves their anti-wealth experiment was over -- and turning to the impending war in Europe.

The point for us in our own fragile moment is clear. To be sure, clean up is necessary. It can even help the market -- some. But in the long run what works politically is different from what works economically. Revenge, however sweet, cannot bring recovery.

3DHS / You do not own your labor

« on: September 20, 2008, 03:59:44 PM »

What happens when government does not respect property rights? You no longer are allowed to own your labor.

http://www.citynews.ca/news/news_25452.aspx

Jon Tennett loves to tinker in his garage. It's not an uncommon pastime for an 81-year-old man, but what is unusual is the city's response.

Because Tennett fixes his neighbours' lawn mowers and other small machines, the City of Pickering has charged him with operating an illegal business - even though he's never charged a penny for his work.

[...]

But Pickering's commercial zoning bylaws do not allow any form of home business whatsoever - and the penalties are severe.

Tennett's case is currently before the courts and if he loses, he could be fined up to $25,000.

Fair warning: sarcasm ahead.

I guess you cannot really blame the government of Pickering. I mean, they're just doing their job, right? If they don't enforce the law then the law is meaningless, right? I am sure the residents of Pickering are all mighty proud to have the government looking out for their best interests.

3DHS / The government at work, keeping us safe... or something...

« on: August 13, 2008, 11:35:22 PM »

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/nyregion/13detain.html

In April, Mr. [Hiu Lui] Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

[...]

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng's lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

[...]

Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng's who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center's director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for "chronic back pain." He added, "We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible."

Officials have given no explanation why they took Mr. Ng to Hartford and back on the same day. But the lawyers say the grueling July 30 trip appeared to be an effort to prove that Mr. Ng was faking illness, and possibly to thwart the habeas corpus petition they had filed in Rhode Island the day before, seeking his release for medical treatment.

The federal judge who heard that petition on July 31 did not make a ruling, but in an unusual move insisted that Mr. Ng get the care he needed. On Aug. 1, Mr. Ng was taken to a hospital, where doctors found he had terminal cancer and a fractured spine. He died five days later.

[...]

But his condition continued to deteriorate. Once a robust man who stood nearly six feet and weighed 200 pounds, his relatives said, Mr. Ng looked like a shrunken and jaundiced 80-year-old.

"He said, 'I told the nursing department, I'm in pain, but they don't believe me,' " his sister recalled. " 'They tell me, stop faking.' "

Soon, according to court papers, he had to rely on other detainees to help him reach the toilet, bring him food and call his family; he no longer received painkillers, because he could not stand in line to collect them. On July 26, Andy Wong, a lawyer associated with Mr. Cox, came to see the detainee, but had to leave without talking to him, he said, because Mr. Ng was too weak to walk to the visiting area, and a wheelchair was denied.

I'm hoping I don't have to say why this is a bad thing. It should be pretty obvious.

3DHS / McCain's plan to deal with crime

« on: August 01, 2008, 05:10:24 PM »

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/08/a-surge-on-the.html

McCain called them tactics "somewhat like we use in the military."

"You go into neighborhoods, you clamp down, you provide a secure environment for the people that live there, and you make sure that the known criminals are kept under control," he said. "And you provide them with a stable environment and then they cooperate with law enforcement."

The ABC News blog says it sounds a lot like the surge in Iraq. I'm thinking it sounds a lot like a police state. Yet another reason I have no intention of voting for McCain.

3DHS / Police honored for firing at the wrong family

« on: July 30, 2008, 05:00:16 PM »

Apparently Minneapolis police can do no wrong. After a raid into the wrong house on a December Sunday morning at 12:45, where in the father of the family fired at what he thought were robbers, and the wife had time to call 911 and report people breaking into the home before police identified themselves, an investigation was started to determine how the police could have made such a mistake. So, the residents of the house, including six children, are left dealing with bullet holes and the stress and trauma of the night, and meanwhile the police officers involved have been given medals and commendations.

http://wcco.com/iteam/swat.team.honored.2.783216.html
http://wcco.com/crime/minneapolis.police.raid.2.612926.html
http://wcco.com/iteam/i.team.police.2.651664.html
http://wcco.com/local/police.raid.house.2.613690.html

Granted, I am a distant outsider to this. But I can't help thinking giving the officers medals is perhaps not really appropriate.