Free Speech

Here is a passionate plea by Robert Reich for more free speech and less bought-and-sold politics:



As a bonus... Here's Robert Reich on the "super-committee" and 4 steps to economic recovery:

The Police are Hard of Hearing

Either they are hiring deaf cops in NY City or the Constitutional protection of the "free press" isn't worth the paper it is written on...



I would say it is pretty obvious that option #2 is in effect in America. The press is "free" to report glowing stories about "job creators" and the heroic efforts of Republicans to control deficits. But when it comes to civil society and basic rights, the Constitution is a some relic from the past that nobody is interested in despite all the claims by the political right that they are "guided" by the Constitution.

If you are curious about just how "easy" it is to get a press pass so that you can try to exercise your so-called "rights" in America, here is an article in the New York Observer that lays out some of the details and frustrations of the "process". As she points out, the law "requires":

Applicants also must submit one or more articles, commentaries, books, photographs, videos, films or audios published or broadcast within the twenty–four (24) months immediately preceding the Press Card application, sufficient to show that the applicant covered in person six (6) or more events occurring on separate days.

But to meet that requirement:

According to the last paragraph, you have to demonstrate coverage as an uncredentialed reporter in order to get credentialed. So the only way to comply with the law is to have previously broken the law repeatedly.

Ah... the joys of a bureaucratic mind. You can get a job if you can prove that you are presently employed. Meanwhile, we'll beat you about the ears for being lazy and unwilling to work because you are unemployed. That's the reality for 25 million unemployed in the US. Obviously the same screwy "bureaucratic rules" apply to getting "press credentials". First you need to be credentialed and previously covered 6 news events. This makes the insiders safe, but it create a Kafkaesque nightmare for anybody outside the system.

Freedom to Peacefully Assemble and Petition the Government

Freedom in action:



The above video is a little hard to square with this very clear statement of citizen's rights in the United States Constitution, specifically the 1st Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

I guess the Constitution really means that you have a "right" to peacefully assemble unless the police get annoyed and decide to take pot shots at you and harass you because they find your video camera "annoying".

If you ever read the USSR's Constitution or Communist China's Constitution, they are full of "rights". Wonderful documents. But only a fool would take the chance to act on any of those "rights" because those documents were purely window dressing to wave at the world and declare that those countries were "great democracies" with all the latest and best "rights" for their citizens. Banana Republic USA has joined their ranks. Lots of wonderful "rights" but don't you dare take them seriously.

Update 2011nov10: Here is an article in the San Jose Mercury News about the above incident:

Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor who's an expert in police decision-making and use of force, said the video left him "astonished, amazed and embarrassed."

"Unless there's something we don't know, that's one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I've ever seen," he said. "Unless there's a threat that you can't see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force."

Campbell said his friends saw him get hit and rushed him away to the shelter of a doorway. Someone brought an ice pack while a legal observer took down information, and then his friends helped him get to a taxi. He saw a doctor later Thursday, who told him to keep the wound bandaged and iced. He said Monday he has a 1½ -inch wound with swelling and bruising around it.

Campbell said he does social and digital media work for a local nonprofit and supports Occupy Oakland. "I don't camp out there, I've been a participant but not an active organizer," he said. "I've come out for general assemblies and marches, and I came out that day for the general strike to show my support."

He said he brought his camera that night to document any excessive force used by police, never imagining that might make him a target. "I don't know if I was in the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right time."

He said he wants an independent, not internal, investigation of this and other reports of excessive force, and is considering whether to take legal action.

...

"It looks terrible," agreed Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, who consulted with Oakland police on the federal consent decree emerging from the Riders scandal. "It certainly looks like they singled him out to be shot ... and there does not appear to have been any sort of attack by the protester. Clearly, the camera is not approaching the officers, so they couldn't claim that he posed a threat."

Paul Chevigny, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, said it looks like "a violation of his First Amendment rights apart from being a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He has a right to take a film of what the police do -- we've been over this thousands of times -- unless he's interfering in some way.

"The basic problem of police retaliating against people who are trying to record what's going on is perennial," said Chevigny, adding this occurs all over the nation. "They (officers) consider it a kind of 'contempt of cop.' It's an expression of the fact that people do not trust the police. The police read it as a criticism of them. It's not even necessarily that they're trying to prevent people from seeing what they're doing.

"But this extreme version (of retaliation) is very unfamiliar to me," he added. "I can't imagine what they're going to say about shooting this guy. Sounds like the Oakland police need a little brush-up on their training."

You Have "Rights" Until You Exercise Them

In America they pound their chests over their democracy and their political "liberty" and all the "rights" their citizens have. But from my perspective all I can see is that you have the right to cut your own throat, to lose your job, and to have your children starve. Those aren't the rights that were written up in the Constitution, but those are the "rights" given to ordinary people -- but not the billionaires who can buy rights as they please -- in contemporary American society.

The response of the "free" media in the US to Occupy Wall Street makes this utterly obvious...

First, here is an Atlantic Wire story about Lisa Simeone:

With yesterday's news that Lisa Simeone was fired from her one radio gig but retained at her other, we now have word on what exactly both radio shows were thinking when they made their decision. Simeone was canned as host of Soundprint, a documentary show, after it came to light that she participated in the Occupy D.C. protests, but she's keeping her hosting duties at her other show aired on NPR, World of Opera, as the two shows are produced by different companies. Maryland-based Soundprint Media Center, which produces Soundprint but is not part of NPR, said Simeone's participation in the protest clearly violated NPR ethics code, which the company adopted for itself because "listeners don't know the difference between NPR and independent producers across the country," the AP reports. Moira Rankin, the president of Soundprint, clarifies the company's decision in the report:

In my mind, it's fine if you want to be a leader of an organized protest movement, but you can't also be in a journalistic role. You can't be the host of a journalism program and plead that you are different than the reporter who is going to come on a minute after you introduce the program.

However, World of Opera, distributed nationally by NPR, is produced by WDAV, a classical-music radio station in North Carolina, and it doesn't see any conflict of interest where Soundprint does. "Ms. Simeone's activities outside of this job are not in violation of any of WDAV's employee codes and have had no effect on her job performance," a station spokesperson wrote in an email to the AP. Interestingly, although the national network itself "questioned" Simeone's activism, saying that its code of ethics applies to cultural radio shows like hers, NPR is emphasizing that it can't take action against someone it doesn't employ. "We are not her employer, but she is a host for a show that we distribute," an NPR spokesperson told the AP. "She's a public person who represents NPR and public radio."

For the record, Simeone defends her choice to protest here:

I find it puzzling that NPR objects to my exercising my rights as an American citizen -- the right to free speech, the right to peaceable assembly -- on my own time in my own life. I'm not an NPR employee. I'm a freelancer. NPR doesn't pay me. I'm also not a news reporter. I don't cover politics. I've never brought a whiff of my political activities into the work I've done for NPR World of Opera. What is NPR afraid I'll do -- insert a seditious comment into a synopsis of Madame Butterfly?

Second, here is an Atlantic Wire story about Caitlin E. Curran:

The people who make shows for NPR stations, dinged by the perception that they're a bunch of kneejerk liberals, are proving themselves to be very, very touchy about how their employees participate with Occupy Wall Street. Today, Gawker has posted the first-hand account of Caitlin E. Curran, a Brooklyn-based former freelancer for The Takeaway, which is co-produced by NPR-member station WNYC and Public Radio International, who was fired from her public radio gig as a part-time web producer after her boss discovered she (briefly) participated in an Occupy protest.

Update 2: We've added WNYC's response below, in which the station says Curran was fired because, "When Ms. Curran made the decision to participate in the protest and make herself part of the story, she violated our editorial standards."

Update: We initially used "NPR" in the headline for this story which is incorrect because the show The Takeaway is more identified with NPR competitor PRI even though it airs alongside NPR programming. We've corrected the error, but there's also this point to make: the public radio economy contains many independent actors alongside NPR. There is the national organization, local broadcasters, independent producers and distributors all involved in programming on what listeners would consider "NPR stations." So, while NPR is not a centralized organization that controls all of public radio, the "NPR is liberal" critics are prone to paint with a broad brush. If anything, Curran's story illustrate how far the fear of looking too liberal has permeated the entire public radio ecosystem.

Curran was canned after her boss found the now-famous photo of her (right) holding a sign with paraphrased text from The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf, from his post on the Occupy movement. She chronicles what happened after that in her post:

My boyfriend, Will, and I decided to take Friedersdorf's words and use them, perhaps more literally than he intended. We printed them out, taped them to poster board, and headed to the Occupy Wall Street march in Times Square, on October 15. The plan was for Will to hold the sign, and for me to observe what happened and post reports to my personal Twitter account ... But, inevitably, Will developed sign-holding fatigue, and I took over momentarily.

That's when a photographer snapped the Occupy picture reblogged 'round the world. So she decided that all of this notoriety would make for great radio, so he pitched a segment idea on her experience on The Takeaway. But a day later, she got the boot from The Takeaway, which said she "violated every ethic of journalism," according to Curran. All this of course echoes the firing of Lisa Simeone after she was found to be working as a spokesperson for Occupy D.C. Curran, like Simeone, offered a defense of her actions on Gawker:

My thinking ran along the same lines as Simeone's. It's unclear to me how our participation, on our personal time, in a non-partisan movement warrants termination from our jobs. If the protest is so lacking, in terms of message and focus, then how can my involvement with it go against The Takeaway's ethical policies? In other words, if I'm associated with a party-less movement (and barely associated, since that was only the second time I've attended an Occupy Wall Street event), and have never exercised bias in editing The Takeaway's website, what's the harm?

Here is the full statement from WNYC spokesperson Jennifer Houlihan:

Caitlin Curran was a freelance news producer for The Takeaway, a morning news program co-produced by WNYC and Public Radio International (PRI). In that capacity she was expected to observe the general standards of journalistic practice and more specifically WNYC's editorial guidelines which require that editorial employees be free of any conflict that might compromise the work of the show overall. The Takeaway has covered the Occupy Wall Street story since its beginning through active reporting on the protests and the positive and negative responses to those events. When Ms. Curran made the decision to participate in the protest and make herself part of the story, she violated our editorial standards. At that time the program made the decision to no longer use her services as part of the production team.

It is lovely to have liberties that are purely theoretical. It is ridiculous to have rights that can only exist in your mind and never be acted upon. But that is "democracy" in America, the land of the "free", home of the "brave", where lollipops hang from the trees and the bastard billionaires dance across the landscape dressed as sugar plum fairies assuring everybody that if they get just "one more tax cut" then they will create jobs for everyone!

The Right to Peacefully Assemble for the Redress of Grievances

Here is a video that gives more "context" to the Occupy Oakland incident. It is fairly clear that the police were not threatened. Instead, you hear them reading the riot act to citizens peacefully assembled seeking a redress of grievances. Then all hell breaks loose...



Here is the specific event:



It is obvious that a government has the right to control crowds, but the legal and police authorities have to be lenient with crowds with a political grievance. Otherwise you turn a democracy into a police state where the only "right" you have is to ask "how high?" when the state tells you to "jump". That isn't freedom. That is tyranny.

The police have no right to use force in a situation where the crowd is peaceful. Even suiting up in full riot gear is provocative. It shouldn't be done. And you certainly shouldn't be carrying out "street clearing" actions under the cover of dark and a fusilade of grenades and tear gas. That is war, not policing.

Update 2011nov12: Here is an update from Veterans for Peace on the condition of Scott Olsen, the injured ex-Marine who served in Iraq and was shot by trigger-happy cops at the Occupy Oakland protests:

Adele Carpenter Updates VFP on Scott Olsen

Hi, all.

I had a chance to visit Scott this evening. He is very present, alert, and has a lot of energy. He is still struggling with speech, but is attempting conversations without having the writing instrument out. He also is doing an amazing job of staying patient with himself and didn't seem to get frustrated with himself or need to rush when trying to work out thoughts in speech. Personally, it was a huge relief to see him after last having seen him while he was sedated and in critical condition.

We did talk some business and I wanted to give an update on that.

Housing: His parents are coming tomorrow and they will be looking for a place in the South Bay near where he will be accessing outpatient treatment. He said he doesn't know if they need help looking and I agreed to call his mom tomorrow to check about how their settling here might go. He said that he and Keith will look for a place in Berkeley after his parents leave in November.

Visiting and Support: He said he doesn't want or need any formal plans for visitation, like making a schedule of folks to keep him company when he is out, and that informally scheduling visits has been fine and he will let people know if he needs something else. He doesn't have any big wishes or desires for when he gets out of the hospital. He already got to go out for Thai food, but other than that, he is just focused on getting better.

Legal: Scott is aware that allies have offered legal contacts trained in police accountability and veteran issues. I also told him that several lawyers have expressed urgency around his case and investigation being taken up. He said he is already taking care of this and that if he wants bios or contacts for those lawyers, he will let me know.

Media: Scott would like to shoot to put out a statement for Vet's day, but doesn't want to rush himself because he doesn't know how much energy its going to take when his parents arrive and also with transitioning out of inpatient over this week. If he does write something, he would like someone to look it over. I also assume he'd rely on us to disseminate any statement to press contacts. I really wanted to respect that he not push himself since there will be a lot going on the next few days. If he does write something or want help composing something, he knows that we are more than willing to line up support.

Hope that covers the business end. My overall impression was that he is both trying to take it easy, but is also able to start taking care of his affairs and knows that he can ask for support if he needs it. I'm really happy he's doing so well and seems both accepting and determined. All good news for today.

Thanks,
Adele.
Civilian-Soldier Alliance

You Have "Rights" But Just Not Here

Here is an attempt to hold an "assembly to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" on the steps of the Supreme Court. But you get arrested there despite what the US First Amendment says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

So... the Constitution says you have a right to petition, but the "laws of the land" say not here, not there, and not over there. You have a right, but if you try to exercise that right, you get arrested! Here was an attempt to exercise a Constitutional right and it got the protesters arrested:



The joke is:

The Constitution gave no "rights" to corporations, but the Supreme Court has empowered things to be "people" by giving corporations more rights than people have. Corporations don't need to petition their government because they simply buy the politicians they need.

The reason why the founders of the US put in the First Amendment was that they knew that people would not have the power individually and had to have a mechanism to get the attention of their government. But the government, through laws and legal decisions, has systematically shutdown all access except to those with the money to buy access. The Supreme Court has participated in this farce by twisting the Constitution to ignore facts and make up "new realities" that cater to the very rich in the very process that has corrupted the system!

Freedom of Assembly to Petition for the Redress of Grievances

From the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You have "rights" just not the ability to actually exercise those rights. You can assemble but not here. You can voice your grievances but not here, not there, not by uttering anything audible. You are free to think thoughts but not to actually demand the exercise of your rights and certainly not to attempt to change a corrupt Wall Street-owned government that is not interested in hearing your grievances...

There is "freedom of the press" in the US but not when there is a "park regulation" that says the "park is closed". In the George Orwell world of "rights" the whole of the US is a "park" and new park regulations assure everybody of the "right to a free press" but unfortunately the "park is closed 24x7 until further notice". So... long live the freedoms in the US... freedom of the press... freedom of assembly... freedom to petition your government...

The US people have lost over $10 trillion because of corrupt and fraudulent practices on Wall Street, 25 million people in the US have lost their jobs, 10 million houses have been or are in the process of being foreclosed, government services have been cut. But Wall Street got to collect nearly a trillion dollars in TARP money and hand out billions in taxpayer money for "bonuses" for a "job well done".

It is a crime to protest the corruption. It is a crime to try to bring the grievance before the authorities. But it isn't a crime to use fraudulent and corrupt business practices to destroy the US economy or to buy out the politicians so that they keep forking over tax payer dollars to allow Wall Street to feast while the country starves. The real inflation-adjusted income of the bottom 90% has shrunk over the last 3 years while Wall Street continues to get free money from the Federal Reserve. The bought-and-sold politicians are still using taxpayer money to bulk up the profits of Wall Street while they allow Main Street's economy to be strangled.

When the people protest this corruption, they are arrested while the big money types of Wall Street look down from their towers and chuckle. All's fine in the world if high finance.

The struggle continues... Occupy Wall Street.

The American Theory of Government

Funny... Americans will chew your ear off over their Constitution and their liberties. But the actual embodiment of those ideas, their government, they hate it!

Here's a bit from a post by Robert Reich on his blog:

But the truly remarkable thing is how little faith Americans have in government to set things right. This cynicism poses an even bigger challenge to Obama and the Democrats – and perhaps to all of us.

When I worked in Robert Kennedy’s senate office in the summer of 1967, America also seemed off track. Our inner cities were burning. The Vietnam War was escalating.

Yet most Americans still held government in high regard. A whopping 66 percent of the public told pollsters that year that they trusted government to do the right thing all or most of the time.

Now 30 percent of Americans say they trust government to do the right thing.

What’s responsible for this erosion? Not the Great Recession or the government’s response to it. Most of the decline in public trust occurred years before.

While 66 percent trusted government in 1967, by 1973 that percent had eroded to only 52 percent. By 1976, barely 32 percent of Americans said they trusted government to do the right thing. By 1992, 28 percent. Trust bounced up during the Clinton administration (I’m happy to report) but cratered again during the George W. Bush’s presidency, ending at 30 percent, and hasn’t recovered since.

Call it the Republican Weapon of Mass Cynicism.

...

Decades of Republican rhetorical scorn – Reagan’s repeated admonition, for example, that government is the problem rather than the solution – have contributed. But the most powerful sources of cynicism have been actions rather than words.

One has been the misuse of public authority. Consider Nixon’s Watergate, the Reagan White House’s secret sale of arms to Iran while it was subject to an arms embargo and illegal slush fund for the Nicaraguan Contras, Tom DeLay’s extensive system of bribery, and the Republican House’s audacious impeachment of Bill Clinton. To the extent these abuses generated public scandal and outrage, so much the better for the Weapon. The scandals fueled even more public cynicism.

Another source has been a flood of money pouring into government from big corporations, Wall Street, and the super rich – in return for public subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks, and a steady lowering of tax rates. Democrats aren’t innocent, but Republicans have been in the forefront. (As governor, Rick Perry has raised more money than any politician in Texas history, rewarding his major funders with generous grants, contracts, and appointments.)

The GOP has pioneered new ways to circumvent campaign finance laws, blocked all attempts at reform, and appointed and confirmed Supreme Court justices who believe corporations have First Amendment rights to spend whatever they want to corrupt our politics.

A third source has been regulatory agencies staffed by industry cronies more interested in protecting their industries than the public. Here again Republican administrations have led the way: the failure of financial regulators to prevent the Savings & Loans implosion; corporate looting at Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia other big companies; and then the biggest speculative bubble since 1929, bursting in ways that hurt almost everyone except the financiers who created it. A Mineral’s Management Service that turned a blind eye to disastrous oil spills from the Exxon-Valdez to BP; mine Safety regulators whose nonfeasance lead to the Massey mine disaster; an FDA that allowed in tainted meds from China.

Democrats have had their share of political hacks and cronies, but Republicans have made an art of cashing in on government service through sweetheart deals for their former companies (think of Dick Cheney’s stock options with Halliburton), and cushy jobs and lobbying gigs when they leave office. And the GOP has taken the lead in resisting all attempts to prevent such conflicts of interest.

The cynicism has been fueled, finally, by repeated Republican threats to bring the whole government to a grinding halt – from Newt Gingrich and fellow House Republicans’ shutdowns in the 1990s to John Boehner and companies’ near assault on the full faith and credit of the United States government months ago. When the whole process of governing becomes bitterly partisan and rancorous – when common ground is unreachable because one side won’t budge – government looks like a cruel game.

...

Back to that summer more than four decades ago when I worked in Robert Kennedy’s senate office. There was no doubt in my mind I’d devote part of my adult life to public service. It wasn’t so much that I trusted government – the Vietnam War had already tapped a cynical vein – as that I looked to government as the major instrument of positive social change in America.

I was not alone. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, Medicare, an American landing on the moon – and before that an interstate highway system, expansion of higher education, GI Bill – and before that, The New Deal and World War II – all had engraved in the public’s mind the sense that government was something to be proud of, an entity that we could rely on when times got tough.

Times are tough again, but the Weapon of Mass Cynicism has convinced most Americans they can’t rely on government to help them out now. The nation is even entertaining the possibility of cutting Medicare and Medicaid, college aid, food stamps, Head Start. Perry calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme, and many are ready to believe him.

But if we can’t trust government at a time like this, whom can we trust? Corporations? Wall Street? Bill Gates and Warren Buffett?

Or is each of us now simply on our own?

Pathetic.

For a country that started on the theory "if we don't all hang together we shall certainly all hang separately" to come to now "understanding" their Constitution as a radical libertarian doctrine of "each man for himself" and "there is no society except the contract you sign with another". The fact that families exist, the the US still has large numbers of volunteer organizations is solid proof that Americans understand that society is not a pure cash transaction. But they've been so bullied by right wing propaganda, that they mouth it and tell pollsters that they don't trust anybody and that it is a dog-eat-dog world and that's exactly what the Constitution called for: minimal government, small enough to drown in a bathtub. It is really hard to understand how people have been sold this right wing nonsense when the very Constitution begins with...

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Nothing in there about the right to carry AK-47s with 100 round clips, that the rich have the right to watch the poor starve by the side of the street, that life is so precious that you save embryos but let the teenagers starve and underfund schools until they are simply prisons, that corporations are full-fledged citizens with full rights to buy any election they want, etc., etc.

Something More Important than Weiner's Wiener

I get annoyed with how the media finds silly stuff, minor stuff, personal stuff far more important than really important political and economic stuff. There are 14 million people without jobs. That means there are roughly 30 million people hurting badly, struggling to put food on the table, or to keep a roof over their head. But the press makes all the time in the world for stories about immature idiots who sexting.

Here is a post by Paul Krugman which puts this in its place:

The Case of the Mystery Study

Oh, wow. From Greg Sargent:

The other day, the consulting company McKinsey released a startling study claiming that 30 percent of employers are planning to stop giving health insurance to their workers as a result of the Affordable Care Act. The study received a good deal of press coverage and was widely bandied about by conservative politicians and media outlets as proof that conservative warnings about the law are coming to pass.

But as a number of critics were quick to point out, McKinsey’s finding is at odds with many other studies — and the company did not release key portions of the study’s methodology, making it impossible to evaluate the study’s validity.

There’s now been a new twist in this story.

I’m told that the White House, as well as top Democrats on key House and Senate committees, have privately contacted McKinsey to ask for details on the study’s methodology. According to an Obama administration official and a source on the House Ways and Means Committee, the company refused.

One has to assume that there was something terribly wrong with the study. At any rate, nobody should be citing it until or unless McKinsey comes clean.

Oh, and if you ask me, this is a lot more important than some sex scandal.

Update: The plot thickens. Brian Beutler reports:

But multiple sources both within and outside the firm tell TPM the survey was not conducted using McKinsey’s typical, meticulous methodology. Indeed, the article the firm published was not intended to give the subject matter the same authoritative treatment as more thorough studies on the same topic — particularly those conducted by numerous think tanks, and the Congressional Budget Office, which came to the opposite conclusion. And that’s created a clamor within the firm at high levels to set the record straight.

“This particular survey wasn’t designed in away that would allow it to be peer review published or cited academically,” said one source familiar with the controversy.

All sources were granted anonymity, in order to be able to speak candidly about the controversy.

Reached for comment today, a McKinsey spokesperson once again declined to release the survey materials, or to comment beyond saying that, for the moment, McKinsey will let the study speak for itself. However, McKinsey notes that the survey is only one indicator of employers’ potential future actions — that the conclusions remain uncertain and employers’ future decisions will ultimately depend on numerous variables. The three authors of the report were not immediately available for comment.

Another keyed-in source says McKinsey is unlikely to release the survey materials because “it would be damaging to them.”

Both sources disagree with the results of the survey, which was devised by consultants without particular expertise in this area, not by the firm’s health experts.

This is a scandal. McKinsey is obviously putting together political propaganda to sabotage the Democrat's health care bill by putting out a rumour that private companies were abandoning their health care plans. This kind of "dirty tricks" campaign is sleazy. It should be getting top billing. But nope. The "media" has decided that idiotic can't-keep-it-in-their-pants behaviour deserves top billing. Oh, and the media has joined the pitchforks-and-torch crowd wanting to "string 'em up!"

Funny... here is a list of Republican Congressional sex scandals over the last half dozen years. In none of these cases did the Republicans mount a campaign screaming "you must resign!" and the media didn't join in hounding the legislator out of office. Why the uneven behaviour? Why is Weiner selected for "special treatment"?

• Chris Lee – was sexting pictures of himself, but he removed himself too quickly to let much public outrage build (this is the closest to the Weiner scandal)


• Mark Souder – had an affair with a staffer


• Chip Pickering – had an affair, didn’t resign, but chose not to run in the next election


• John Ensign -- he not only had an affair with a staffer, but he had his parents pay hush money to the husband!


• Vito Fossella – guilty of drunk driving, having extramarital sex, and fathering a bastard


• Larry Craig – caught for lewd behaviour in an airport restroom (he claims it was all a misunderstanding about his desire to have a ‘wide stance’), this was attempting to procure gay sex by a politician who publicly called for laws against gays!


• Mark Foley – who sent text messages to underage boys (like Weiner, but worse because it was both underage and it was “gay” sex which of course Foley publicly said was “unacceptable behaviour since the official stance of the Republican party is anti-gay)


• Ed Schrock – solicited sex from a male prostitute


• Don Sherwood – had an extramarital affair and on top of that he physically abused the woman!


• David Vitter - had an extramarital affair and his name was in the little black book of the infamous Washington DC madam Deborah Jeane Palfray while selling himself as a "family values" man who was for "abstinance education" and against gay marriage.

The above is taken from this long, long list of sex crimes by both Republican and Democratic parties.

For the braying crazies hot on Anthony Weiner's case:

1. Polls show that his constituents want him to stay in office and to continue to represent him. For anybody other than a constituent to try and deny the democratic rights of those citizens to be represented by a person of their own choice fails to understand the principles of democracy and the Constitution of the US.


2. All those Christian "family values" types who want to crucify Anthony Weiner should pull out their Bibles and read John 8:7 "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Hypocrites!

Why can't the media perform its real job: inform the public on important issues so that the electorate can wisely choose its representatives? Why feed the salacious in-the-gutter mind of the lowest common denominator? Why join in a partisan, one-sided attack? Why distract the electorate with a stupid sex scandal when much more important issues affecting 30 million people immediately that the whole society indirectly (via the recession and collapsing economy)?

Proof that the US Government is Serious About Getting Citizens to Testify in Court

The US government is tired of sending summons to citizens and waiting for them to appear in court. The country has decided to get serious.

No more nice summons in the mail. Now they will imprison you and subject you to unlimited strip searches to make sure you are properly "motivated" to testify in court cases that the the police have decided are "serious". And of course the US Supreme Court fully agrees with this new vigorous interpretation of a citizen's "duty"...

From the BoingBoing blog:

The Supreme Court ruled today that former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft cannot be personally sued over his role in the arrest of an innocent American citizen, a Muslim man who was never charged with a crime. From the Associated Press:

By a 5-3 vote, the court said Ashcroft did not violate the constitutional rights of Abdullah al-Kidd, who was arrested in 2003 under a federal law intended to make sure witnesses testify in criminal proceedings. Al-Kidd claimed in a federal lawsuit that the arrest and detention violated the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.

He was held for 16 days, during which he was strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes.

The ACLU's response to the ruling is here.

I can't wait to find out what the new court policy is on parking tickets. Maybe kill your first born if you don't pay promptly? Sell your wife and family off into slavery? I'm sure that these new "patriots" in the judicial system in the US will come up with something appropriate because they are serious, the mean business, and they are "getting tough" on slackers who don't take "justice" as seriously as they do.

Political Rights in America

The US loves to flaunt its "freedoms" that are Constitutionally "protected". Here is an example of "freedom in action"...



I love it when the cop says "I can do whatever I want" as he arrested a CBC camera man covering a peaceful protest by citizens in Newark, New Jersey about street shootings that have left innocent people dead. The "law" in the US says you have the right to assemble peacefully, but apparently the police are unaware of this "fact". They obviously haven't heard of the US Constitution and its 1st Amendement:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Under the Newark N.J. police interpretation of citizen "rights", you have a right to try to peacefully assemble for redress of grievances, but if you actually get onto the street, then the police can "do whatever they want" and arrest you, manhandle you, throw you into jail, etc. So much for "freedoms" and "rights" in America.

Obama Attacks a Free Press

Not only has the Obama administration been brutal with the not-yet-guilty-until-judged-in-a-court-of-law Bradley Manning. They are now going after the press to stop journalists from printing news. Funny, the Constitution is very clear that the press must be free of undue control by the government. The press must be free so that a "free" people can make judgements about their representatives so that the democracy is real and not fake. The 5th Amendment to the US Constitution:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Even Richard Nixon didn't go so far as to jail Daniel Ellsberg over releasing the secret Pentagon Papers, documents that proved that the US government had been systematically lying to the American people about its policies, intentions, and actions in Vietnam. Sadly, the Obama administration appears not to favour a free press. As well it does not appear to believe in "due process" of the law, i.e. you are innocent until proven guilty. Otherwise it would not be torturing Bradley Manning.

From BoingBoing:

Federal prosecutors, with the approval of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., are trying to force the author of a book on the C.I.A. to testify at a criminal trial about who leaked information to him about an effort by the agency to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program at the end of the Clinton administration.

What if 90% of the population thinks it should be illegal for agents of the US Government to be trying to assassinate the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? If the press isn't allowed to report the leak that the government is pursuing such a heinous plot, then the people will not have the requisite knowledge to protest and urge their legislators to stop the executive before it commits this crime on "behalf" of the American people. But Obama doesn't believe the US people should know about crimes its agents are doing in other countries. Otherwise it wouldn't be forcing a reporter to break the confidentiality of sources and undermine a free press.

We do know that when Obama says "capture" Osama Bin Laden, that mean "shoot to kill" and don't bother capturing him because we don't want the messy business of having to interrogate, try, and imprison him. We just want him dead. Gosh. I bet police forces all around the US would like to take up that policy when it comes to dealing with violent criminals. Why bother trying to capture them, going through the messy and expensive details of a trial, and then the long and expensive incarceration. Just shoot to kill and then "no fuss, no muss". So you kill a few innocent people. This will "expedite" justice and lower the cost of delivering "justice".

Despite what the rabid right wing Republicans think. Having an effective, lawful government is expensive and messy. It is important that goverment servants don't just short cut "red tape" and deliver what they perceive as "justice" or "services" without any oversight or measure of efficiency, utility, or justice. By its very nature, government is slow and expensive.

Update 2011may24: I watched the PBS Frontline program entitled WikiSecrets. They studiously avoided what I consider the key facts:

1. The US military used "top secret" as a technique to deny facts about a crime to Reuters that wanted an explanation of why their reporter was murdered in cold blood. There was no "secret" here other than ass-covering by the military. If the American public can't find out how badly the war is run, how will the public ever decide that it is doing more harm than good? How can the electorate be "informed" if the US government uses secrecy claims to keep critical information out of the hands of voters?


2. Bradley Manning is being tortured before he is convicted. That is criminal. The Obama administration is allowing the military to torture somebody who is presumed innocent, because he has not yet been tried and found guilty. This is a crime. But Frontline doesn't think that is a significant fact.

My opinion is that Frontline wasted most of an hour. It was fine that they give some background on Julian Assange and Bradley Manning, but they focused on sensationalism and spent little time of facts and they ignored very important issues. That is a disservice to their viewers.

They mentioned the sex charges against Assange, but they didn't bother to point out that it was consensual sex or look at the strange behaviour of these women. They didn't complain until the police got involved. I'm guessing the US twisted arms behind the scenes because they see these charges as their ticket to get Assange extradicted. The fact that the charges are bogus is obvious, but Frontline didn't bother.

The one truthful moment in the Frontline documentary was when they showed the hacker conference in May 2010 when Assange was supposed to show up to speak. The chair of the meeting asked people whether they believed that Assange would walk into the room. The fact that many said "no way!" was the most truthful moment in the documentary. They knew that the US had laid a trap and was hoping desperately that Assange would walk into it. But Frontline didn't talk about the entrapment. They didn't wonder why such a large audience would have a majority that were cynical about their own government and its motives and actions.

I watched three administrations lie about Vietnam. They put every effort into vilifying anybody who opposed that war. But the truth came out. The war was bogus and built on lies. All that money was wasted. All those lives lost for nothing. Today the US is "good buddies" with the Communist regime in Vietnam. But the lie that was fed by the government and the media was that if the youth of America didn't go over and die in some god forsaken jungle, then under the "Domino Theory" the commies would next be in San Diego and take over the US. It was a lie. The government knew it was a lie. But they spread that lie. The government knowingly ruined the lives of many good people who conscientiously opposed the madness of the Vietnam war.

This Frontline "documentary" is just one more bit of government propaganda that willingly smears somebody who does no immediately "buy" the government line that secrecy is sacrosanct and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are noble missions that will "save the world". They aren't. They won't. And all that money and all those lives are wasted for nothing. It is out-of-control militarism now as it was in the 1960s.