from corpwatch dot org/img/original/MigrantWorkers.jpg
Another quote from a corpwatch article on Global Horizons:
"Legal status does not guarantee fair treatment, and some {legal} guest workers endure worse conditions with less recourse than their undocumented counterparts. The H-2A program makes them fully dependent on the employer who recruited them and paid for their transport to the U.S. If they quit or are fired, they must leave the U.S. and if they do not, they are considered undocumented and subject to deportation." http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14...
This, of course, is why they try to tie up the foreign guest workers in debt so that getting fired is a nightmare because of "breach of contract" claims and/or requirement to pay back loans... Then they are under the thumb of the employer who has a monopoly on their labor, and are legal temporary immigrants only for so long as the employer is totally satisfied with their servitude in any way they wish to be satisfied.
Gingrich appears to be engaging in a Golden Rule violation of not extending unto others the mercy and lack of judgmental-ness that he clearly reserves for himself.
When combined with other such examples from DC especially, it bespeaks a two-class system where politicians in fact behave like everyone else (or somewhat worse, but in the same vein) but nevertheless play gotcha with private scandal that displaces the real PUBLIC news, and also acts to distract and divide the people with partisan debates centering about their respective hopes and intentions for the institution of marriage.
But marriage, in the end, is only "instituted" between two people and there are lots of kinds of marriages (open marriages, covenant marriages, gay marriages, marriages of convenience, etc.) and thus there's no "one size fits all" rule to play gotcha with in the first place. All there is in marital-scandal "gotcha" politics that Gingrich is trying to play (and that Democrats sometimes do play as well) is a form of wedge-issue politics that inflames both those who gravitate for and those who gravitate against the particular one size fits all rule being used to bash the other side.
That being said, there's still an issue with Gingrich for not extending to others the same mercy and forgiveness he undoubtedly requires for himself. That's a Golden Rule issue, if you will, and not the politics of personal destruction. And the Golden Rule resonates everywhere, including, of course, into fitness for office.
Several weeks ago, I posted a documented article showing that the rate of foreclosures includes a substantial number of crimes -- such as foreclosures where no money is owed at all because the house is paid off. See http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...
The message: While there is certainly financial distress with many, the foreclosure rate also measures a very substantial number of wrongful foreclosures as well as what can only be called foreclosure crimes - thefts of personal homes.
ABC News -- and yahoo's home page this morning - lead with yet another example of a wrongful foreclosure. Bank of America "apologizes" for its crime, including but not limited to taking or stealing the woman's pet parrot, which she eventually got back. See http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WaterCooler/wire... The yahoo home page right now features a couple minute video on this.
More later, as the foreclosure crimes are only beginning to appear...
Congress may make no law limiting freedom of speech. As of last week, that means no law even as to non-voters & non-humans in the form of corporations that don't know the first thing about democracy because they don't ever practice it with their own employees, breaking the most fundamental ethical rule present in every philosophical and religious system: the Golden Rule.
Hypocrisy is too weak of a word to describe CBS Super Bowl ad policy of turning down ads. CBS makes policy that acts just the same as laws censoring speech based on content, and CBS enforces them as to advocacy ads it considers not "responsibibly produced."
Thus, CBS accepted Focus on the Family's anti-choice/pro-life/anti-abortion ad. It was "responsibly produced."
Let's not in this post focus on the PARTICULARS of the ad refused, in case any readers are inclined to be uncomfortable with the "speech" or say "it's not political per se" and the like.
The really big issue here is the apparently uncontested power of CBS to pick and choose ideological messages to further or not further.
Did Citizens United kick We the People out of any voice or regulation of campaign speech, only to leave us defenseless against arbitrary media-corporate censorship policies to which both the Constitution and laws are inapplicable because they are in the "private" sector of media corporations?
THERE are many ways in which Citizens United does NOT "open the floodgates" (as well as ways it does).
For example, when it comes to CBS policy, it is "shutting the floodgates of gay speech."
When it comes to deterring policitians from taking on big corporations, there doesn't even need to BE a floodgate at all, just the mere threat that big corporations could go on the attack is enough to make our politicians who do not wish to be career-based political suicide bombers into political wimps. You won't see this power on any FEC disclosure form and you never will see it, because it's money NOT spent that is the most powerful.
That's just like the CBS refusal to air the ad for the gay dating service - it's money NOT spent that is even more powerful in distorting our freedoms than money spent!
For example, under Nevada law shareholders are kept secret, so a political corporation can be formed by wealthy contributors and their names not be discoverable.
The infamous Dred Scott decision stood for the proposition that people (slaves) are property.
Today's mirror image of the Dred Scott decision, with the Orwellian name "Citizens United," stands for the proposition that Property is People.
This decision, too, will live in infamy.
Corporations (which are merely property interests) are not the same as, and do not properly have the full political speech rights like individual human beings.
Human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights".
It's always been an axiom of the law that corporations DO NOT HAVE inalienable rights.
But now, even a 100% vote of both Houses signed by the President is insufficient to re-regulate corporations, at least without the consent of the US Supreme Court, because they grounded their ruling in an interpretation of the Constitution. They've weaponized the Constitution and are using it to tie the hands of what is rightfully the only sovereign and ultimate power in the USA - We the People - forcing us to be subjecting to unlimited propaganda all protected by the new-fashioned First Amendment.
No, it doesn't matter if unions will also be able to engage in unlimited propaganda, it doesn't matter even if they weren't dwarfed in financial power by corporations.
Whether people are deemed property or property is deemed "people" - either way people are enslaved to huge machines of property that do not and cannot know the meaning of the word "democracy."
Today's decision is the reverse echo of Dred Scott. Instead of People are Property, it's Properties Are People. That was BS during the time of Dred Scott, and it's still BS today.
Thanks to Land Shark for the Dred Scott mirror image ideas above.
SO far, they haven't said primary ELECTIONS don't have to be fair, but there's a huge incentive if there's tough primaries to "go private" because the selection process, as in Lopez-Torres, can be "controlled by party bosses" and not at all representative of the delegates, and that's cool by the Supreme Court - as private organizations (they are public/private, in fact) they don't have to have fair rules about how they "associate"
In a 2006 worldwide poll of over 27,000 people in Geneva convention countries, the countries with the highest percentage of people willing to tolerate "some" torture under "some" circumstances were: 1. Israel (43%) 2. Iraq (42%), 3. Philippines (40%), 4. Indonesia (40%), 5. Russia (37%) 6. China (37%) 7. USA (36%).
Countries like Australia and Italy were on the other end with vast majorities highly opposed to torture, all of it, without exception (as international law requires).
Note that the questions in these polls don't remind people of what the law is. If they were told that their position violated international law to the extent any torture takes place, there would be significant erosion in the support (though surely not all)
NOTE: If Rasmussen's questions were fair and their polling accurate (which many doubt it is, as it appears to fit the RNC playbook so well every week) then they are implicitly saying that USA has leapt up to #1 in the world in terms of willingness to be an international outlaw on torture, at least in some circumstances.
Right this moment, stock prices for Wellpoint -- the nation's largest health insurance company in terms are skyrocketing, reaching a year to date high and shooting for the stars in a straight upward trajectory. LOOK HERE: http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=... Someone take a screen pic!
The stock price for Wellpoint had skyrocketed to
the Hi for the year 2009 at $60.53 a share (or more) as of 9:56 a.m. EST Monday December 21, 2009.
When at the link above showing the stock chart, click on the "YTD" button above the chart to see Year To Date building of Wellpoint stock value as it becomes increasingly clear that an insurance-friendly health insurance bill will emerge from Congress.
PRIOR TO TODAY, The price of shares in the Indianapolis-based WellPoint had already jumped about 8 percent so far this month. See "Christmas Comes Early for Insurance Executives" from the IndyStar - with good coverage of Indianapolis-based WellPoint: http://www.indystar.com/article/20091220/B...
IN THE PAST TWO WEEKS, Wellpoint CEO Larry Glasscock, had already already pocketed at least $933,000 this month alone in stock sales
(NOTE: He exercised options to buy stock from the company and then sold those shares, keeping his pre-existing holdings intact and diluting Wellpoint's market price by injecting new shares into the market from corporate "treasury" stock, previously unissued, as is the case with such options to buy... In effect, this disguises somewhat the total amount of rise in value of Wellpoint capitalization because the value of the company is diluted by more shares injected into the marketplace.)
While the S&P 500 Index has risen only about 0.7% in December, the other top five or so insurance companies boast even better percentages for December 2009: Cigna shares have risen 12 percent, UnitedHealth Group 10 percent and Humana 5 percent. See http://www.indystar.com/article/20091220/B... (The other insurers in the top eight (Aetna, Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), Health Net, Kaiser Permanente) have not been researched yet or are nonprofits.)
For extra fun, slide the sliding bar on the "volume" of sales chart just below the price chart, and enlarge the time period to, say, incorporate the prior Bush administration by setting it back to start at 2001 or 2002. If you do this, you will note that Wellpoint is now achieving the stock prices it enjoyed from early 2003 to late 2007 (i.e., essentially the bulk of the GWB administration)
HAPPY DAYS ARE HERE AGAIN!!! (for insurance companies)
ON EDIT: On other things Indiana-based besides Wellpoint stock, Senator Evan Bayh stated a few days ago on FOX that he may vote against health care "...if {the CBO} indicates, Neil, that it raises the deficit," in which case Sen. Bayh says "I`m not going to vote it." (as part of his opposition to the recent $1.1 trillion spending bill). See http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,580387...
I'm sure that Sen. Bayh's wife has no influence or connection to her husband, Senator Bayh, but Senator Bayh's wife does sit on the Wellpoint Board of Directors. See Indystar link, above.
Currently, with common stock ownership, the government has to think of the penalty it will pay, in the value of the common stock shares, if ANY regulatory action is taken that diminishes corporate profitability.
Distributing token common stock share amounts (relatively speaking to other interests of citizens, such as in fair pay for work done) to citizens clearly results in the strong tendency for citizens to bet on the big corporation and favor its interests because it is now their "horse in the race" -- they own stock and are thus a "stakeholder" with GM (or whoever) that they never were before. They will then tend to "take care" of what they 'own' -- never mind that the total amount of increase in value will never compensate them for inattention to other areas that would benefit the person much more.
related to the opening quote of the Obama speech, citing John Adams is this treaty language, negotiated under President Washington and signed by President Adams:
"The United States is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or Mohammedan Nation."
-- Treaty language, Unanimously confirmed by the US Senate in 1797, and signed by President John Adams.
That's the First Amendment test of a lawful restriction on speech. It seems the issue would end up being the "imminent" nature of the threat. It's been upheld that one can write a book on how to kill someone and that's not imminent enough. This is closer to the line of incitement of immminent violence. I don't resolve the issue, myself. But I always recommend the mental exercise of substituting in one's favorite internet radio host's name, and perhaps modifying the specific issue slightly, but using the same incitement words, and then decide if one still thinks the incitement of imminent lawless action test has been met.
My motivation to raise the issue of the Golden Rule (in an important sense, that's what the substitution exercise is above) is Thomas Paine's warning:
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates his duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
on edit: quotes provided courtesy of fellow DU'er Land Shark!
On ALL OF THE NEWER US PASSPORTS, on pp. 26-27 one finds the following quote:
“The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class, it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” –Anna Julia Cooper
Thomas Paine, acknowledged happily by Jefferson and grudgingly by John Adams as the architect of the American Revolution wrote:
“I speak an open and disinterested language, dictated by no passion but that of humanity. {…} Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.. –Thomas Paine, from “The Rights of Man”
Thomas Paine was perhaps the original “do-gooder” so despised by a few these days?
Benjamin Franklin, considered at the time in both Europe and America as the world’s smartest man, and of course a very influential Founder, said:
Our cause is the cause of all mankind, and…we are fighting for their liberty in defending our own. Benjamin Franklin
We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom and that belief has always strengthened us in our progress. President Jimmy Carter
We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious is it for the American to be called by Providence to this post of honor. -- Benjamin Franklin
Max Lucado in “America Looks Up” describing America’s vision using the male pronoun: “He placed his hand on the shoulder of humanity and said "You're something special."
“Individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience. Therefore (individual citizens) have the duty to violate domestic laws to prevent crimes against peace and humanity from occurring. –Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, Following World War II, 1950
President Eisenhower:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from an iron cross. -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” address delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Washington, D.C., April 16, 1953
President George Washington in his Farewell Address:
“Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. {...} It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankindthe magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. {...} In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated...”
“{Dear Lord} Bless us with thy wisdom in our counsels, success in battle, and let our victories be tempered with humanity. Endow, also, our enemies with enlightened minds, {…} nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done."
War is a defeat for humanity. -- Pope John Paul II
And also the supposed nemesis of Catholics, Martin Luther, identified with humanity as a whole and wrote:
“War is the greatest plague that can affect humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge is preferable to it.”
Our system of government is, EVEN ABOVE THE CONSTITUTION in TERMS OF POWER, based on inherent or inalienable rights, specifically recognized as being perpetual and self-evident (no need to prove them in any way). (just read paragraph 2 of the Declaration of Independence closely).
As Frederick Douglass said, the principles of the Declaration are “saving principles”, i.e., principles to fall back on when we’ve lost control of our government or our rights are not recognized. In that light, regarding the suffragist movement, it was said:
“Our political system is based upon the doctrine that the right of self-government is inherent in the people … Women are a portion of the people, and possess all the inherent rights which belong to humanity. They, therefore, have the right to participate in the government. Mr. Sears, arguing in favor of the 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage.
{A belief such as the American belief in equality means that} it is not possible to separate self-respect from respect for the lives of others that are worthy of the same for the same reasons as your own life. Therefore, we can not act to harm or deny the dignity of another human being without harming or insulting our own dignity. As Immanuel Kant put it, respect for our own lives as such means respect for humanity. – Legal Philosopher Ronald Dworkin
inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners, all of which are jus cogens offenses under international law. That is, they are binding on all countries regardless of whether they have signed a treaty to that effect or not because they are considered, and are, universally accepted norms of international behavior. Even more importantly, there are no exceptions or defenses to jus cogens offenses, EVEN IN TIMES OF WAR (most of these offenses are most often seen in times of "war").
THose who transgress the lines of torture, slavery, genocide, and inhumane and degrading treatment of prisoners are (since this does of course still happen) then considered and often expressed called "enemies of humanity."
My take on this: It's strange that they would DOCUMENT or attempt to document such illegal behavior -- because they know that even if they will have de facto immunity from US prosecution, there is still the court of world opinion and politics to consider. The administration still considers these factors important, because at one point one of the secretaries of defense called for testing certain electromagnetic crowd control weapons on american "mobs" or protests FIRST, because to use them first in an international war situation would lead to worldwide press condemnation. This rationale (crazy as it is) shows that they are concerned about world opinion, at least to some extent. It also shows their lack of concern for the rights and safety of americans, at least if they are intentionally or accidentally part of some crowd, mob or protest at which these weapons are then used...
The strangeness of collecting evidence on one's own illegal behavior reinforces what I find is a broad bipartisan agreement on one true threat to the USA: that large mega-corporations, that are widely known to have no loyalty to the USA or any other country (they routinely outsource instead of loyally keep jobs in America, for example), are larger than most nation-states, and essentially the only force left on earth that can regulate or otherwise restrict these corporations' ability to have "liberty" over the entire Earth is a true democracy in the good old U.S. of A. So it is in the natural self-interest of corporations to WEAKEN or destroy our ability to so regulate or control them.
As Abraham Lincoln wryly put it, the wolf and the sheep have different ideas of Liberty, the wolf thinks liberty consists of being able to eat the sheep, while the sheep thinks liberty consists of being able to be let alone and free to feed on grass and, perhaps, contemplate the clouds or whatever...
I'm not attempting to assemble HERE all the evidence for the case that large corporations are intentionally (or as a side effect of intentionally pursuing their natural self-interest) the weakening or destruction of America as a force strong enough the regulate them. (But corporations, to be sure, have a legally-mandated one-track mind for shareholder profits and are incapable, therefore, of having in mind the public interest to the extent that conflicts with the pursuit of profit. THEREFORE, they are on a course dead-set against the public interest, and only the DEGREE of that conflict is debatable, not its existence).
At the same time, how much "evidence" is really needed? The conflict between corporations and self-governance is so apparent and widely observed that it is my experience that rank and file republicans agree on this point (all of the real repubs who are not committed ideological neocons). But you won't see it of course in the corporate media, because it is at the very least an implicit attack on the power of virtually all of their advertisers. This, among other things, makes it hard for our media to serve the people as was intended by the Founders -- who for this reason and others enshrined a single business area within the ambit of the Bill of Rights, and that business area was the press, in the First Amendment.
Rather than needing evidence (though much exists) for this assault on america by corporations, it instead is pretty much self-evident that this assault on America's power by corporations exists, at least to normal thinking Americans of any party.
