Category: Class War

‘A fundamental transformation’

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

In one of the better pieces I’ve seen, Christiane Amanpour leads a worthwhile discussion on This Week with journalists who cover the Middle East, talking about the dangers of democracy in a movement with no clear leadership. The BBC’s John Simpson expressed concern that the Muslim Brotherhood could rise to power in that vacuum, just as they did in Iran after their revolution. He also said most people understood the U.S. was more interested in stability in the region than democracy:

Veteran Egyptian journalist Nadia abou el-Magd said it comes down to the protesters. “They that made revolution and they are in the position to impose their conditions,” said el-Magd, who works for the newspaper Al-Ahram and The Associated Press. “They don’t see that … anybody else is in a position to impose their conditions on them.”

Egyptian journalist Lamia Radi said the protestors “will try to stay as long as they can,” but, she warned, there is “mounting pressure from the people who want to be back to business [and] … the sympathy is waning a little bit, especially among the people.

“But, of course, no one wants to give up. They know they have done something unprecedented in this area, in this region, especially in Egypt where you have been under a dictatorship for maybe 7,000 years now,” said Radi, who works for the newswire Agence France Presse and the newspaper Al-Shorouk.
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Buying Congress

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Until we pass legislation reversing the Citizens United decision that allows corporate billionaires to pour massive amounts of campaign cash into the system, we’re pretty much screwed. Unless, of course, we start to walk like Egyptians, and I don’t see that happening:

The billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch no longer sit outside Washington’s political establishment, isolated by their uncompromising conservatism. Instead, they are now at the center of Republican power, a change most evident in the new makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Wichita-based Koch Industries and its employees formed the largest single oil and gas donor to members of the panel, ahead of giants like Exxon Mobil, contributing $279,500 to 22 of the committee’s 31 Republicans, and $32,000 to five Democrats.

Nine of the 12 new Republicans on the panel signed a pledge distributed by a Koch-founded advocacy group — Americans for Prosperity — to oppose the Obama administration’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases. Of the six GOP freshman lawmakers on the panel, five benefited from the group’s separate advertising and grass-roots activity during the 2010 campaign.

Claiming an electoral mandate, Republicans on the committee have launched an agenda of the sort long backed by the Koch brothers. A top early goal: restricting the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversees the Kochs’ core energy businesses.
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Arrests

~ susie

Can you imagine a U.S. news organization doing a good job despite government orders to shut down? I can’t:

The chief of Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language bureau in the Egyptian capital has been arrested along with a reporter from the same channel, the Qatar-based news network reported early Saturday morning.

“Egypt’s security services have arrested Al Jazeera bureau chief in Cairo Abdel Fattah Fayed and the journalist Ahmed Yousef,” Al Jazeera said on its website.

This comes a day after a group of unidentified men stormed the Cairo offices of the pan-Arab news channel, starting a fire and smashing equipment.

Al Jazeera reportedly also said that nine of its journalists were detained on Friday amid a huge rally against President Hosni Mubarak and that its broadcast signal faced “unprecedented levels of interference.”

Yeah, I lost the signal several times yesterday and wondered if the government was trying to shut them down.

Where are the indictments?

~ susie

Still waiting!

NEW YORK — After the last major banking crisis, some two decades ago, roughly 3,800 bankers were prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms, by the Justice Department’s count. Yet this time, some four years after the economy descended into the most punishing financial crisis since the Great Depression, the public still waits for the Obama administration to deliver a similar kind of justice.

The 2007-’09 financial crisis was “avoidable,” a bipartisan, congressionally-appointed panel concluded last week. Mortgage fraud “flourished” in the run up to the collapse. Securities fraud was apparently widespread.

“Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities,” the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission wrote in its report on the causes of the collapse. About $1 trillion worth of home loans made from 2005 to 2007 were “fraudulent,” the commission said, citing testimony from experts. The Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, told the commission that she defined fraud to include lenders’ “sale of unaffordable or structurally-unfair mortgage products to borrowers.”

And yet, the perp walk so many Americans crave — Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner once referred to it as the “very deep public desire for Old Testament justice” — hasn’t occurred. Wall Street figures have largely gone untouched. Bank directors kept their jobs. In a sign that perhaps the fallout from the crisis has passed, outsized compensation is back.

“People need to go to jail,” said Liz Ryan Murray, policy director of National People’s Action, an advocacy organization that helped launch the website CrimeShouldntPay.com. “If you steal something, you go to jail. If you falsify documents, you go to jail. Why doesn’t that apply to big bank executives?”

Oops

~ susie

I forgot to put up the link to listen to Monday night’s radio show with Natasha Chart and Chris Bowers:

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio

You’ll also want to listen to last night’s show with Jay Ackroyd and David Cay Johnston, because it’s time to end the corporate free lunches:

Listen to internet radio with Jay Ackroyd on Blog Talk Radio

99

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

Go read the rest:

I’ve finally arrived. End of the line. My last benefit check comes next week. The finality of it is chilling. With no job, my house teetering at the edge of foreclosure and with no prospects to speak of, I could easily fall into a white hot panic right now. But as an inspirational poster once told me: “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the control of it.” So I must have control. I’ve got to be the rock climber on that poster.

Between anxiety attacks, I’ve been thinking. Big questions. What am I doing with my life? Mentally and emotionally speaking, have I become a ward of the state? Is now the time to reinvent myself? Should I follow my passions? Do I have passions anymore? Has being unemployed for over two years diminished my self image and my capacity for hope so significantly that I’m just a zombie now? Partly, yes. Sadly, the fear and the anxiety have taken a toll. I’m chronically depressed. I second guess myself all the time. And in interviews, I feel like I’m asking for a handout. The list of side effects goes on. But is this psychological deformation reversible? I hope so. It has to be. I cannot let my worth and my identity be prescribed to me anymore. In a cruel way week 99 is helping me see that.