Category: Power to the People

The Department of Pre-Crime

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

I don’t even recognize this country anymore. Members of our ironically named “Justice” Department are little more than private security guards for the corporate elite:

A Justice Department representative told congressional staffers during a recentbriefing on the computer fraud prosecution of Internet activist Aaron Swartz that Swartz’s “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto” played a role in the prosecution, sources told The Huffington Post.

Swartz’s 2008 manifesto said sharing information was a “moral imperative” and advocated for “civil disobedience” against copyright laws pushed by corporations “blinded by greed” that led to the “privatization of knowledge.”

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive,” Swartz wrote in the manifesto. “We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.”

The “Manifesto,” Justice Department representatives told congressional staffers, demonstrated Swartz’s malicious intent in downloading documents on a massive scale.

Swartz was 26 when he killed himself in January. He had been indicted by federal prosecutors in 2011 for downloading millions of academic journal articles from the nonprofit online database JSTOR using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network. He faced a felony conviction and prison sentence for downloading the articles, though he maintained he had permission to access them.

In California

~ susie ~ 7 Comments

How progressives balanced the state’s books.

Actually the answer is quite simple. Progressive Democratic activists identified the straitjacket of rules that had the state tied up in knots, and devised a systematic plan to change them. Through massive organizing, they transformed the electorate and sidelined Republican obstructionists. Now, with surplus money on hand, they’re getting ready to fight a new battle over the next few years: whether to focus on budget balancing and debt reduction, or to continue to boldly invest in California’s future. National Democrats, mired in a series of endless fiscal showdowns in Washington, ought to pay attention: California suggests a way to overcome continual hostage-taking and government-by-crisis.

The executive orders translated

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

I wish I didn’t know so many people who thought like this. Charlie Pierce:

Slate‘s Dave Weigel helpfully has listed the 23 Executive Orders issued by the president today in connection with his initiative on gun violence. Let us put them all through the helpful NRA Tyranny Translator and see what we get, OK?

1. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.

(The singular of “data” is “tyrant.” Look it up.)

2. Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.

(You’ll get our schizophrenia when you pry it from our cold dead hands.)

3. Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.

(Someone in Vermont will know what I’m doing. The jackboot of Ben And Jerry’s is on my neck.)

4. Direct the Attorney General to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.

(First they came for the insane, and I said nothing, because I was not insane. Then, they came for the felons, and I said nothing, because I was not a felon. Then they came for the Christians in my town…wait, maybe I am insane.)

5. Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.

(See? SEE? The gun is already seized. They’re putting together “new” regulations but they’re already talking about “seized” guns. False flag! False flag!)

6. Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.

(I am bunkered down outside, near the curb, in case the ATF invades my property by mail.)

7. Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.

(We have that now. It’s called Everybody Gets A Gun. We already are working on the updated version; Everybody Gets More Guns.)

8. Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).

(First, the CPSC came for the toys….slippery slope! Slippery slope!)

9. Issue a Presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.

(If criminals are outlawed, only outlaws will be criminals.)

10. Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.

(My right to lose my gun and have a cannibal murderer find it cannot be abridged.)

11. Nominate an ATF director.

(If the jackboot fits…)

12. Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.

(Wait, I like this.)
Continue reading “The executive orders translated” →

The president of your dreams

~ susie

Is in Uruguay!

In the late 1960s, inspired by the Cuban revolution, he became an anti-government guerilla fighter. He was eventually shot six times by the police and sent to prison for more than a decade, including a two-year stint in solitary at “the bottom of a well.”


“His net worth upon taking office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800 – the value of the 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. He never wears a tie and donates about 90 percent of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor.” He keeps about $800 a month for himself.


“Under Mr. Mujica, who took office in 2010, Uruguay has drawn attention for seeking to legalize marijuana and same-sex marriage, while also enacting one of the region’s most sweeping abortion rights laws and sharply boosting the use of renewable energy sources like wind and biomass.” LIBERAL DREAMBOAT.


He decided not to live in the presidential mansion after becoming president, electing to say in his tiny-ass apartment outside Montevideo.
He disparages the idea of serving more than one term as president.

Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

A hero, standing up for her people:

Ontario, the three Prairie Provinces as well as large parts of British Columbia and the Northwest Territories all sit on land that First Nations people signed over to Canada in exchange for a package of government guarantees. Treaty 9, the 1905/1906 treaty signed the people of Attawapiskat, for instance, guarantees that, in perpetuity, First Nations would receive “benefits that served to balance anything that they were giving.” The treaty also guaranteed total Aboriginal control over reserve lands. Idle No More organizers point to the disastrous state of Aboriginal health and living conditions on First Nations reserves and allege that these treaty rights are not being properly honoured — and that current attempts to amend the Indian Act will only erode existing Aboriginal rights. “Canada has not committed itself to addressing the colonial relationship it still has with indigenous peoples,” wrote Metis blogger Chelsea Vowel earlier this month. “I think it’s fair to say that most Canadians believe that kind of relationship no longer exists. We are trying to tell you that you are wrong.”

Texas petitioners: Let my people go

~ odd man out

Roughly 80,000 petition-signing good ol’ boys ‘n’ girls have had it up to their 10-gallon hats with a federal government that insists on meddling in the affairs of their home state, cruel and unusual Texas. The New Republic recently addressed their grievances:

…Maybe the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.

Sound like a Texan secessionist’s dream? Well, it’s no dream. This country already exists. It’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Occupy Sandy

~ susie

I’m happy to see the Occupy movement is alive and well, but I’m disturbed to see how chaotic and sporadic the recovery aid is from the “official” aid organizations. This story is heartbreaking.

Westfahl headed upstairs in the dark to the tenth floor. He encountered a woman wrapped in a babushka who gestured that she was both deaf and mute. Through pantomime, Westfahl determined that she had water, and she opened the door of her refrigerator to show him the contents. “She doesn’t have much food at all,” he said quietly.


Benham and Fidget talked to a Chinese woman who spoke little English. She was “okay,” she said, “but maybe person … ” she pointed them inside, where an elderly man lay in bed. Benham checked his vital signs, and they scanned the room for medications. “He’s got nitro — so he’s a heart patient, he’s got heart disease, that’s for anti-clotting, he has episodes — this might even be a hospice case,” Benham said. Out in the stairwell, he said, “In New Orleans, that patient would have been evacuated, and would have died in the evacuation.” It was better for him to remain at home for now.


It was growing dark. Piser and Westfahl left to answer one last dispatch call for a cancer patient who needed a daily dose of chemo. Fidget duct-taped a sign on the outside of the building saying that every floor had been checked by Occupy Sandy for urgent needs. “It comes down to the fact that they got these knocks,” said Lederman, the nurse. “I think it could be a psychological disaster — at the very least — if nobody at all came for six days.”