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Banned
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mixedmedia, the sentiment against gun registration and control was exemplified in the '80's film "Red Dawn", which drew a "cult like" following:
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Dawn
<b>Themes</b>
......The private ownership of weapons is also presented as part of the film’s anti-Communism. Early in the film, a bumper sticker seen on a truck states a classic gun owner’s creed; “They can have my gun when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.” The shot moves down to a dead hand holding an empty Colt pistol as well as shots of the same pistol being pried from the dead person's hand by a Soviet paratrooper. As the protagonists flee the initial invasion of Calumet, they stop at a local sporting goods store owned by one of their fathers. He tells them to gather supplies and gives them several rifles and pistols along with boxes of ammunition. (The father and his wife are later executed because of the guns missing from the store’s inventory.) In a later scene, a Cuban officer orders one of his men to report to the local sporting goods store and obtain the paperwork of local citizens who own firearms. The Cuban officer specifically refers to Form 4473, which is the actual form used to record the sale of a firearm by a dealer to a private citizen in the United States. These scenes speak to the long-standing issues of government gun control.....
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"P" = one percent of US population and "$" = one percent of US assets:
US Wealth distribution in 2004:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showpos...7&postcount=12
Top one percent of US population own more than 33 percent of US assets:
Quote:
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P assets= $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$
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Next nine percent of US population own 36.1 percent of US assets:
Quote:
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PPPPPPPPP assets=$$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $
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Next forty percent of US population own 28.3 percent of US assets:
Quote:
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PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP assets= $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$$$ $$$
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Bottom fifty percent of US population own 2.5 percent of US assets:
Quote:
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PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP PPPPPPPPPP assets=$$$
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The bottom 50 percent own only five sixths of what is displayed in the preceding visual aid.....
...and that measly 2-1/2 percent is intentionally "chipped away":
Quote:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...hok&refer=home
Regulators Quiet as Lenders `Targeted' Minorities (Update1)
By Craig Torres
June 13 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. agencies that supervise more than 8,000 banks haven't censured any of them for violating fair-lending laws, three years after Federal Reserve researchers began assembling data showing blacks and Hispanics are more likely than whites to be saddled with high-priced home loans.
Minorities stand to be hardest hit by rising delinquencies and foreclosures in subprime loans. While Census Bureau data show that homeownership rates rose to records among blacks in 2004 and among Hispanics in 2005, they still trail whites by 25 percentage points, and the gap may widen in the current bust.
``Black people and Hispanics have been targeted,'' said Alphonso Jackson, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, whose department is hiring to expand its own probe of discriminatory lending. .......
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...-2005Feb8.html
Sick and Broke
By Elizabeth Warren
Wednesday, February 9, 2005; Page A23
Nobody's safe. That's the warning from the first large-scale study of medical bankruptcy.
Health insurance? That didn't protect 1 million Americans who were financially ruined by illness or medical bills last year.
A comfortable middle-class lifestyle? Good education? Decent job? No safeguards there. Most of the medically bankrupt were middle-class homeowners who had been to college and had responsible jobs -- until illness struck.
As part of a research study at Harvard University, our researchers interviewed 1,771 Americans in bankruptcy courts across the country. To our surprise, half said that illness or medical bills drove them to bankruptcy. So each year, 2 million Americans -- those who file and their dependents -- face the double disaster of illness and bankruptcy.
<h3>But the bigger surprise was that three-quarters of the medically bankrupt had health insurance.</h3>
How did illness bankrupt middle-class Americans with health insurance? For some, high co-payments, deductibles, exclusions from coverage and other loopholes left them holding the bag for thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs when serious illness struck. But even families with Cadillac coverage were often bankrupted by medical problems.
Too sick to work, they suddenly lost their jobs. With the jobs went most of their income and their health insurance -- a quarter of all employers cancel coverage the day you leave work because of a disabling illness; another quarter do so in less than a year. Many of the medically bankrupt qualified for some disability payments (eventually), and had the right under the COBRA law to continue their health coverage -- if they paid for it themselves. But how many families can afford a $1,000 monthly premium for coverage under COBRA, especially after the breadwinner has lost his or her job?
Often, the medical bills arrived just as the insurance and the paycheck disappeared.
Bankrupt families lost more than just assets. One out of five went without food. A third had their utilities shut off, and nearly two-thirds skipped needed doctor or dentist visits. These families struggled to stay out of bankruptcy. They arrived at the bankruptcy courthouse exhausted and emotionally spent, brought low by a health care system that could offer physical cures but that left them financially devastated.
Many in Congress have a response to the problem of the growing number of medical bankruptcies: make it harder for families to file bankruptcy regardless of the reason for their financial troubles. Bankruptcy legislation -- widely known as the credit industry wish list -- has been introduced yet again to increase costs and decrease protection for every family that turns to the bankruptcy system for help. With the dramatic rise in medical bankruptcies now documented, this tired approach would be no different than a congressional demand to close hospitals in response to a flu epidemic. Making bankruptcy harder puts the fallout from a broken health care system back on families, leaving them with no escape.
The problem is not in the bankruptcy laws. The problem is in the health care finance system and in chronic debates about reforming it. The Harvard study shows:
• Health insurance isn't an on-off switch, giving full protection to everyone who has it. There is real coverage and there is faux coverage. Policies that can be canceled when you need them most are often useless. So is bare-bones coverage like the Utah Medicaid program pioneered by new Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt; it pays for primary care visits but not specialists or hospital care. We need to talk about quality, durable coverage, not just about how to get more names listed on nearly-useless insurance policies.
• The link between jobs and health insurance is strained beyond the breaking point. A harsh fact of life in America is that illness leads to job loss, and that can mean a double kick when people lose their insurance. Promising them high-priced coverage through COBRA is meaningless if they can't afford to pay. Comprehensive health insurance is the only real solution, not just for the poor but for middle-class Americans as well.
Without better coverage, millions more Americans will be hit by medical bankruptcy over the next decade. It will not be limited to the poorly educated, the barely employed or the uninsured. The people financially devastated by a serious illness are at the heart of the middle class.
Every 30 seconds in the United States, someone files for bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious health problem. Time is running out. A broken health care system is bankrupting families across this country.......
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The senate voted down a democratic amendment to protect the medically bankrupt from "reform":
Quote:
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LI...n=1&vote=00016
U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 109th Congress - 1st Session
as compiled through Senate LIS by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate
Vote Summary
Question: On the Amendment (Kennedy Amdt. No. 28. )
Vote Number: 16 Vote Date: March 2, 2005, 04:56 PM
Required For Majority: 1/2 Vote Result: Amendment Rejected
Amendment Number: S.Amdt. 28 to S. 256
Statement of Purpose: <b>To exempt debtors whose financial problems were caused by serious medical problems from means testing.</b>
Vote Counts: YEAs 39
NAYs 58
Not Voting 3
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Shortly after the article above was published, almost all republicans in congress voted to pass a "reform bill" resisted by congressional democrats for at least ten years, and a democratic president until 2001, and the republican president signed the bill into law.....
....none of the benefits to credit card holders, promised by the industry in exchange for passage of bankruptcy "reform", actually came to pass:
Quote:
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0...t_cards02.html
Credit Card Executives Tough Out Senate Hearing
Disclosure Statements Written at "27th-Grade Level"
In what played out as a good versus evil scenario, Senators and consumer advocates battled with three of the most powerful men in the credit card industry at a Capitol Hill hearing today.
The woes of millions of Americans who are slaves to hidden fees, compounding interest and cryptic terms were heard in a Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing......
.....Of the more than a dozen complaints raised against the credit card companies, Levin also raised an issue which he coined "trailing interest."
Trailing interest is the practice of charging interest on entire bill no matter what percentage of it is paid.
"Suppose a consumer who usually pays their account in full, and owes no money on December 1, makes a lot of purchases in December, and gets a January 1 credit card bill for $5,020," Levin said. "That bill is due January 15. Suppose the consumer pays that bill on time, but pays $5,000 instead of the full amount owed. What do you think the consumer owes on the next bill?
"If you thought the bill would be the $20 past due plus interest on the $20, you would be wrong. In fact, under industry practice today, the bill would likely be twice as much. That's because the consumer would have to pay interest, not just on the $20 that wasn't paid on time, but also on the $5,000 that was paid on time.
"The consumer would have to pay interest on the entire $5,020 from the first day of the billing month, January 1, until the day the bill was paid on January 15, compounded daily," Levin continued. "In our example, using an interest rate of 17.99 percent ... the $20 debt would, in one month, rack up $35 in interest charges and balloon into a debt of $55.21."
Bruce Hammonds, president of Bank of America Card Services, Richard Srednicki, chief executive officer of Chase Bank USA and Vikram Atal, Chairman and CEO of Citi Cards, all said that "trailing interest" is a practice shared by various lending schemes but gave no specific examples.
Senators also discussed grace periods, a widely advertised feature that gives credit card holders a period of time to pay their bill before interest is applied to their balance. However, Levin discovered that grace periods only apply to individuals who pay their statement in full each month.
The credit card executives said those restrictions are explained in their terms and conditions.
Sparking around round of laughter, Chase's Srednicki said, "I think the large majority of our customers understand (that grace periods only apply to accounts paid in full)."
Two of the three credit card companies recently announced changes in policy in an attempt to placate the subcommittee.
Atal, of Citi, said his bank will no longer automatically raise interest rates for cardholders who fail to make payments on other bills. Known as "universal default," the practice has long been criticized by consumer advocates who argue it victimizes poorer borrowers.
After publicly apologizing to Wannemacher, Srednicki announced Chase eliminated a practice known as double-cycle billing "a few days ago." The practice involves tacking on fees calculated based on two prior months.....
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We are "fed" soothing messages like this from "think tanks" funded by multi millionaire right wingers:
Quote:
http://www.aei.org/publications/filt...pub_detail.asp
Happy for the Work
By Arthur C. Brooks
Posted: Wednesday, June 20, 2007
ARTICLES
Wall Street Journal
Publication Date: June 20, 2007
It is vacation season once again, giving occasion for the usual homilies about how Europeans are having a much better and healthier time of it than we are when it comes to work. You've heard it a thousand times: Americans "live to work," while Europeans "work to live."
By almost every measure, Europeans do work less and relax more than Americans. According to data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, <b>Americans work 25% more hours each year than the Norwegians or the Dutch. The average retirement age for European men is 60.5, and it's even lower for European women. Our vacations are pathetically short by comparison: The average U.S. worker takes 16 days of vacation each year, less than half that typically taken by the Germans (35 days), the French (37 days) or the Italians (42 days).</b>
Why these differences? There are two standard explanations, neither of which casts Americans in a particularly good light. First, we are emotionally stunted. According to Time magazine, "In the puritanical version of Christianity that has always appealed to Americans, religion comes packaged with the stern message that hard work is good for the soul. Modern Europe has avoided so melancholy a lesson."
Obviously, there is a point beyond which work is excessive and lowers life quality. But within reasonable bounds, if happiness is our goal, the American formula of hard work appears to function pretty well.
Second, we are under the yoke of hard-bitten capitalism. London's Daily Telegraph reports that the heavy U.S. work effort does not result from a special affinity Americans have for work; rather, it is because we are "terrified of losing [our] jobs" in a labor environment in which workers have few of the protections Europeans enjoy.
According to either explanation of the high American work effort, we would be a lot happier if we could somehow throw off our chains--both emotionally and legally--and demand shorter work weeks, longer vacations and bulletproof tenure until our early retirements. A tidy hypothesis, to be sure--until we look at the facts.
The truth is that most Americans don't feel particularly shackled. To begin with, an amazingly high percentage of us like our jobs. Among adults who worked 10 hours a week or more in 2002, the General Social Survey (GSS) found that 89% said they were very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with their jobs. Only 11% said they were not too satisfied or not at all satisfied......
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Until recently, we could console ourselves by proudly believing that, "at least we're free !":
Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...030802356.html
Frequent Errors In FBI's Secret Records Requests
Audit Finds Possible Rule Violations
By John Solomon and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 9, 2007; Page A01
A Justice Department investigation has found pervasive errors in the FBI's use of its power to secretly demand telephone, e-mail and financial records in national security cases, officials with access to the report said yesterday.
The inspector general's audit found 22 possible breaches of internal FBI and Justice Department regulations -- some of which were potential violations of law -- in a sampling of 293 "national security letters." The letters were used by the FBI to obtain the personal records of U.S. residents or visitors between 2003 and 2005. The FBI identified 26 potential violations in other cases.....
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Quote:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...032000921.html
FBI Violations May Number 3,000, Official Says
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 21, 2007; Page A07
The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.
Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that according to the FBI's own estimate, as many as 600 of these violations could be "cases of serious misconduct" involving the improper use of "national security letters" to compel telephone companies, banks and credit institutions to produce records.
National security letters are comparable to subpoenas but are issued directly by the bureau without court review. They largely target records of transactions rather than personal documents or conversations. An FBI tally showed that the bureau made an average of 916 such requests each week from 2003 to 2005, but Fine told the House Judiciary Committee that FBI recordkeeping has been chaotic and "significantly understates" the actual use of that tool.
Fine, amplifying the criticisms he made in a March 9 report, attributed the FBI's "troubling" abuse of the letters to "mistakes, carelessness, confusion, sloppiness, lack of training, lack of adequate guidance and lack of adequate oversight."
His account evoked heated criticism of the bureau from Republicans and Democrats alike, including a comment from Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Calif.) that it "sounds like a report about a first- or second-grade class.".....
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Quote:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003430.php
Today's Must Read
By Spencer Ackerman - June 14, 2007, 9:18 AM
Stop the presses: enhanced powers given to the FBI to obtain communications or financial data in national security investigations without judicial approval... has been repeatedly abused!
.....Fine discovered the FBI had been using NSL's to circumvent the more cumbersome process of obtaining warrants, relying on NSLs in non-terrorism cases or under circumstances where they didn't meet the "specific and articulable" threshold. That, however, was on a relatively limited scale -- 22 cases out of a sample of 293 -- although Fine noted that between 2002 and 2006, the FBI issued a staggering 19,000 NSL's. Today, the Washington Post finds that the March report only <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/13/AR2007061302453.html?hpid=topnews">scratches the surface</a>:
<b>An internal FBI audit has found that the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times while collecting data about domestic phone calls, e-mails and financial transactions in recent years, far more than was documented in a Justice Department report in March that ignited bipartisan congressional criticism.
The new audit covers just 10 percent of the bureau's national security investigations since 2002, and so the mistakes in the FBI's domestic surveillance efforts probably number several thousand, bureau officials said in interviews. The earlier report found 22 violations in a much smaller sampling.
</b>
When the story broke in March, embattled FBI Director Robert Mueller <a href="http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=2569&wit_id=608">promised</a> the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was acting expeditiously to fix the problem.
According to the Post, the audit has so far turned up no evidence of intentional wrongdoing. Instead, its found that the FBI has been less than rigorous in ensuring that agents understand that NSLs are supposed to be used only in terrorism-related emergencies, and carry with them a strict limit on how long collected information may be retained. Once again, the FBI is promising that it'll put enhanced safeguards into place, and now has a "clear plan" to do so:
<b>Of the more than 1,000 violations uncovered by the new audit, about 700 involved telephone companies and other communications firms providing information that exceeded what the FBI's national security letters had sought. But rather than destroying the unsolicited data, agents in some instances issued new National Security Letters to ensure that they could keep the mistakenly provided information. Officials cited as an example the retention of an extra month's phone records, beyond the period specified by the agents.
Case agents are now told that they must identify mistakenly produced information and isolate it from investigative files. "Human errors will inevitably occur with third parties, but we now have a clear plan with clear lines of responsibility to ensure errant information that is mistakenly produced will be caught as it is produced and before it is added to any FBI database," (FBI General Counsel Valerie) Caproni said.</b>
The FBI should conclude its audit in the next few weeks. That should give Mueller enough time to prepare for his next round of hat-in-hand testimony.
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If you consider the supporting info in my last post, and the material in this one, it is quite obvious to me that all of the "reform" since the 1916 Industrial Relations Committee study and report, commissioned during the term of President Woodrow Wilson and described by Senator Huey P. Long in the video of his mid 1930's speech in the US senate.....the right of women to vote, the labor movement that resukted in the National Labor Relations Board and legal protections for union organizers and a means for mediated labor negotiations with management and enforcement of labor contracts via binding arnitration, and later passage of the civil rights act, desegregation, and equal opportunity employment protections, passage of SSI and of unemployment insurance, and protection and oversight of employer funded pension plans, <h3>none of it....has resulted in more equitable distribution of wealth in the U.S.</h3> The trend toward more equitable distribution peaked in the early 1960's before income taxes, formerly levied at a top rate of 90 percent on income above $400,000 annually, began to be adjusted down to less than 40 percent, today.
Some folks have posted that they will "know" when the circumstances justify taking up armed resistance agains the government or agains the establishment, The POTUS has acted to usurp our protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and against our habeas corpus protections, and he has reinterpreted the constitution and international treaty protections to redefine torture to mean whatever he and his lawyers decide that it is. There is overwhelming evidence that he, his party, and his attorney general deliberately reversed civil and voting rights protections and enforcement to suppress the vote of the political opposition.
The disparity of wealth distribution has never been more unequal, and our protections against government surveillance, arrest without trial or legal representation, and against unreasonable, search, seizure, and surveillance have never been so blatantly transferred from the public to the federal executive branch, and voter protections have not been this weak since 1964.
Still.....we say that now is not the time, it is not appropriate for organized and determined protest and resistance, by any means necessary to reverse these trends and restore the pre-Bush era constiution, and pre 1960's top rate income tax levels, at the least.
So we wait.....I guess until the bottom 50 percent have lost the 2-1/2 percent asset holdings that they now enjoy, and the next 40 percent, half of the 28.3 percent of total US wealth that they currently hold....and when our uncle or our neighbor is hustled away by DHS agents in the night, to indefinite detention in an undisclosed location.......is that it? What is your tolerance level? Would a warrantless, "sneak and peak", "visit" to your home, or your safe deposit box, by government investigators, assuming you even discovered their intrusion, be enough to move you ?
Oh....that's right.....you say you'll know when resistance is appropriate....and I say.....bullshit ! Your present complacency....while your bill of rights are stolen and half of your countrymen calmly settle for crumbs....gives your sheep like resignation, away. You ain't ever going to do nothing.....Bush and Cheney have known it since December 12, 2000, and the rich men at CNP have known it since Reagan took office, and took away progressive income taxation. |