Investigators looking into corruption involving reconstruction in Iraq say they have opened more than 50 new cases in six months by scrutinizing large cash transactions — involving banks, land deals, loan payments, casinos and even plastic surgery — made by some of the Americans involved in the nearly $150 billion program.
WASHINGTON — Overruling two important precedents about the First Amendment rights of corporations, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections.
…a much greater danger to the republic than the anointing of corporations as persons with the right to flood our airwaves with propaganda is any attack on Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the principle that my blog is inexpensive to publish and to access, so that I and my readers have the same advantages in this regard as a corporation would. If the Right Wing ever manages to scale the internet and make me pay $70,000 a year to put up this blog and have it easily available to my readers, it will kill it and would signal a return to push media like the networks. And a push-media world where corporations own the Web and can push at us what they please, including their weird ideas about political reality, really would be Orwellian and dangerous.
Once again, the judicial right shows itself to be unrepentant activists, contemptuous of both precedent and the actions of our elected representatives. Anyway, the first thought that leapt to my mind was this quote from the 18th-Century British Jurist, Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who asked “[d]id you ever expect a corporation to have a conscience, when it has no soul to be damned and no body to be kicked.” Well, according to the Supreme Court, a corporation may have neither soul nor body, but evidently possesses a mouth that cannot be shut. This strikes me as a decision that is monumental in its implications and staggering in terms of its fundamental badness.
Corporate Money is Just Like a Citizen’s Speech (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics)
Tara Malloy, attorney with the Campaign Legal Center of Washington D.C. says corporations will now have more rights than people. Only United States citizens may donate or influence campaigns, but a foreign government can, veiled behind a corporate treasury, dump money into ballot battles. Malloy also noted that under the law today, human-people, as opposed to corporate-people, may only give $2,300 to a presidential campaign. But hedge fund billionaires, for example, who typically operate through dozens of corporate vessels, may now give unlimited sums through each of these “unnatural” creatures.
How anyone finds this defensible is beyond me. (via robot-heart-politics)
In 2008 and 2009, Washington strove to save the economy. In 2010, Americans will get a clearer picture of how Washington has changed the economy.
Microsoft has had discussions with News Corp over a plan that would involve the media company being paid to “de-index” its news websites from Google, setting the scene for a search engine battle that could offer a ray of light to the newspaper industry.
Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson — or his successor in the next government) the power to make “secondary legislation” (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).
The contractor got the judgment vacated on the grounds that the court had no in personam jurisdiction to handle the suit. Watching the lawyers for the contractor high-five one another was almost as painful an experience as the first word of his son’s death, Mr. Baragona said. “They bragged, ‘We never even had to notify our insurer.’” The contractor had been required by U.S. contracting rules to take out insurance to cover just such an event–not that it mattered, since no American court could require them to pay. Neither could any court in Iraq, it turns out, because of Order No. 17, issued by Paul Bremer as American proconsul, which had granted contractors immunity from process in Iraqi courts. The contractor, it turned out, had been completely immunized for its wrongful acts.
Grappling with Contractor Immunity (via azspot) (via robot-heart-politics)
Verizon’s upgraded, fiber-driven Web capacities show that ISPs can provide much faster service to the home, but tiered pricing is likely to come, too.
tarting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones. That is, if you get a BlackBerry, Android or similar phone from Verizon, and you decide to switch phones before your two-year contract is up, you’ll be socked with a $350 penalty (it used to be $175).
Read on for even more insults. Emphasis mine.
Cadbury on Monday rejected a hostile cash and shares bid from Kraft that valued the UK confectionery group at £9.8bn or 717p a share, after the US food group formalised the terms of an indicative offer it made two months ago.
Shares in Cadbury, which had been trading higher in morning trading in London, fell 2 per cent after Kraft announced its bid but recovered later in the session to stand fractionally higher at 758½p. Kraft shares were little changed in New York at $26.79.
Who do you want to decide which websites you can visit or what Internet content you can access — you or a big telecom company?
That’s what the fight about network neutrality is all about. Net neutrality is the principle that Internet users, not Internet service providers, should be in control.
The DEA has been writing letters to Fox complaining about House’s “flagrant use and abuse of narcotics without consequence” for years now, and finally the network, writers, and producers all caved in to the government’s demands… in the worst possible way. They decided to make the vicodin House had been taking for over a decade into a sudden hallucinogen, causing him to see dead people. They showed him going through the painful detox, and now he’s just fine and dandy, no reference to his pain at all. And there won’t be any further reference to his pain, other than “it’s all manageable.”
Idiots will consider this to be “character growth” but you can do your own Freedom of Information Act request and get the letters the DEA sent to Fox demanding that “House” no longer show a character using drugs and performing well (exceptionally well, in fact) at his job, without horrible consequences. You know, “for the children.”
Realism in any form is bad for children according to Focus on the Family and the Parents TV Council.
I guess the DEA missed that entire story arc with David Morse just a couple of seasons ago.
Rove blasting anyone for outsourcing anything is like David Vitter lecturing the losers exiting a strip club about the evils of prostitution.
By Jeremy Scahill
Now this just simply could not be made up in that Frankenstein laboratory where the cuckoos on the right wing cook up their witches brew of batshit crazy allegations to levy against Barack Obama. There are scores upon scores of issues where Obama should be rightly taken to task for continuing Bush-era “war on terror” policies, preemptively immunizing torturers, refusing to fight for Single Payer health care, hiring a team of hawks and neoliberal crooks to manage foreign policy and the economy, among many many others. At the same time, there are racist astroturf loons that appear to have recently landed on earth from planet Fiction and are navigating their way through the country, speaking in tongues, led by snakeoil salesmen like Glenn Beck.
But the headline in today’s Wall Street Journal Op-Ed by former senior White House advisor Karl Rove is in a category all its own: “Obama Can’t Outsource Afghanistan.” The article is ostensibly about how Obama is delegating decision making on everything from Afghanistan to the CIA/torture investigation to others:
Mr. Obama’s hands-off approach to the war seems to fit his governing style. Over the past year, he outsourced writing the stimulus package to House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, washed his hands of Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to reinvestigate CIA interrogators, and hasn’t offered a detailed health-care plan.Um, excuse me Karl, how about outsourcing an entire war to politically connected war companies? Remember those eight years? While Rove may be using the term “outsource” in a general way, let’s remember this fact: never, ever in US history have more government and military activities been outsourced to private corporations than they were the day Bush and Rove left 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Obama moved in. For Rove—or any Bush-era official—to have the audacity to blast anyone for outsourcing anything is like a bigger-scale version of Republican Senator David Vitter lecturing the losers exiting Scores “gentlemen’s club” about the moral evils of prostitution.
The real article that should come below a headline “Obama Can’t Outsource Afghanistan” would never be written by Rove. Such an article would denounce the actual scandal of Obama’s continuation of the Bush-Cheney-Rove policy of radically outsourcing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to corporate criminals like Armor Group, DynCorp, Blackwater, KBR, Triple Canopy, Lockheed Martin and many, many others.
Previous: Older Posts >
Total: 1 of 5 Pages
