Pitchforks
photo: Richard Harris
"...It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.
Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.
Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation..."
Click here for the rest.
Are Americans ever going to wake up before they find themselves in a police state?
"...It was Kennedy, of course, who authored Citizens United, which established that independent political spending by corporations is shielded by the Bill of Rights as well. The IMS Health case, which drew much less attention, shows just how pervasive such free speech arguments have become. Once the patron saint of protesters and the disenfranchised, the First Amendment has become the darling of economic libertarians and corporate lawyers who have recognized its power to immunize private enterprise from legal restraint. It is tempting to call it the new nuclear option for undermining regulation, except that its deployment is shockingly routine.
Last summer, the tobacco industry used the First Amendment to have new, scarier health warnings on cigarette packaging thrown out on the grounds that the labels constituted a form of compelled speech. Ratings agencies like Standard and Poor’s and Fitch, whose erroneous and possibly fraudulent AAA ratings of worthless securities helped cause the banking crisis, have leaned heavily on a defense that deems their ratings mere opinions and therefore protected by the First Amendment. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is pushing to gut the disclosure requirements in new securities regulations, citing the free speech rights of hedge funds and publicly traded companies. Attorneys working for Google have argued that, since search results are speech, its rights are impinged by the enforcement of tort and antitrust laws. Southwest and Spirit airlines have employed the First Amendment to resist efforts to force them to list the full price of tickets. The incomplete, misleading cost, they have argued, is a form of free speech, too.
Fred Schauer of the University of Virginia calls such claims “First Amendment opportunism.” Free speech is a cherished American ideal; companies are exploiting that esteem, as he puts it, “to try to accomplish goals that are not so clearly related to speech.” The co-opting of the First Amendment has happened slowly, but not at all by accident. First, it was helped along by questionable court decisions. Today, it is being accelerated by a strange alliance between two groups: a new generation of conservative judges, who have repudiated the judicial restraint their forebears prized, and legendary liberal lawyers, like Floyd Abrams and Laurence Tribe, who, after building their reputations as defenders of free speech, are using their talents to deploy it as a tool of corporate deregulation..."
Click here for the rest.
Are Americans ever going to wake up before they find themselves in a police state?
Photo: Richard Harris
From the NYT:
"Officials who have been questioned in the current investigations are reluctant to describe their experiences. But the account of William E. Binney, who spent more than 30 years at the National Security Agency, shows what can happen.
Mr. Binney, 69, who retired from the N.S.A. in 2001, was one of several people investigated in an inquiry into a 2005 Times article on the spy agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the investigation derailed his career and changed his life. Starting in March 2007, Mr. Binney said, he was interviewed by the F.B.I. three times and felt he had cooperated fully.
But in July 2007, a dozen agents appeared at his house in Severn, Md. One of them ran upstairs and entered the bathroom where Mr. Binney was toweling off after a shower, pointing a gun at him.
Agents carried away a computer, disks and personal and business records. Last year, he and three former N.S.A. colleagues went to federal court to get the confiscated items back; he is still waiting for some of them.
Mr. Binney spent more than $7,000 on legal fees. But far more devastating, he said, was the N.S.A.’s decision to strip his security clearance, forcing him to close the business he ran with former colleagues, costing him an annual income of $300,000.
“After a raid like that, you’re always sitting here wondering if they’re coming back,” Mr. Binney said. “This did not feel like the America we grew up in.” "
Read the rest here.
Obama's campaign promise: the most transparent administration in history. Reality: an unprecedented use of the Espionage Act and all out war on whistleblowers.
From the NYT:
"Officials who have been questioned in the current investigations are reluctant to describe their experiences. But the account of William E. Binney, who spent more than 30 years at the National Security Agency, shows what can happen.
Mr. Binney, 69, who retired from the N.S.A. in 2001, was one of several people investigated in an inquiry into a 2005 Times article on the spy agency’s warrantless wiretapping program.
He was cleared of any wrongdoing, but the investigation derailed his career and changed his life. Starting in March 2007, Mr. Binney said, he was interviewed by the F.B.I. three times and felt he had cooperated fully.
But in July 2007, a dozen agents appeared at his house in Severn, Md. One of them ran upstairs and entered the bathroom where Mr. Binney was toweling off after a shower, pointing a gun at him.
Agents carried away a computer, disks and personal and business records. Last year, he and three former N.S.A. colleagues went to federal court to get the confiscated items back; he is still waiting for some of them.
Mr. Binney spent more than $7,000 on legal fees. But far more devastating, he said, was the N.S.A.’s decision to strip his security clearance, forcing him to close the business he ran with former colleagues, costing him an annual income of $300,000.
“After a raid like that, you’re always sitting here wondering if they’re coming back,” Mr. Binney said. “This did not feel like the America we grew up in.” "
Read the rest here.
Obama's campaign promise: the most transparent administration in history. Reality: an unprecedented use of the Espionage Act and all out war on whistleblowers.
photo: Richard Harris
"Deirdre Yapalater’s recent colonoscopy at a surgical center near her home here on Long Island went smoothly: she was whisked from pre-op to an operating room where a gastroenterologist, assisted by an anesthesiologist and a nurse, performed the routine cancer screening procedure in less than an hour. The test, which found nothing worrisome, racked up what is likely her most expensive medical bill of the year: $6,385.
That is fairly typical: in Keene, N.H., Matt Meyer’s colonoscopy was billed at $7,563.56. Maggie Christ of Chappaqua, N.Y., received $9,142.84 in bills for the procedure. In Durham, N.C., the charges for Curtiss Devereux came to $19,438, which included a polyp removal. While their insurers negotiated down the price, the final tab for each test was more than $3,500.
“Could that be right?” said Ms. Yapalater, stunned by charges on the statement on her dining room table. Although her insurer covered the procedure and she paid nothing, her health care costs still bite: Her premium payments jumped 10 percent last year, and rising co-payments and deductibles are straining the finances of her middle-class family, with its mission-style house in the suburbs and two S.U.V.’s parked outside. “You keep thinking it’s free,” she said. “We call it free, but of course it’s not.”
In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care.
Click here for the rest of the article.
In the article they mention $1,300 per month health premiums. Here in Belgium I pay $37 Euros per quarter.
"A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing..." As long as that remains true, any health "reform" will make no difference to the rising medical costs and the effects pon the US economy will be disastrous.
"Deirdre Yapalater’s recent colonoscopy at a surgical center near her home here on Long Island went smoothly: she was whisked from pre-op to an operating room where a gastroenterologist, assisted by an anesthesiologist and a nurse, performed the routine cancer screening procedure in less than an hour. The test, which found nothing worrisome, racked up what is likely her most expensive medical bill of the year: $6,385.
That is fairly typical: in Keene, N.H., Matt Meyer’s colonoscopy was billed at $7,563.56. Maggie Christ of Chappaqua, N.Y., received $9,142.84 in bills for the procedure. In Durham, N.C., the charges for Curtiss Devereux came to $19,438, which included a polyp removal. While their insurers negotiated down the price, the final tab for each test was more than $3,500.
“Could that be right?” said Ms. Yapalater, stunned by charges on the statement on her dining room table. Although her insurer covered the procedure and she paid nothing, her health care costs still bite: Her premium payments jumped 10 percent last year, and rising co-payments and deductibles are straining the finances of her middle-class family, with its mission-style house in the suburbs and two S.U.V.’s parked outside. “You keep thinking it’s free,” she said. “We call it free, but of course it’s not.”
In many other developed countries, a basic colonoscopy costs just a few hundred dollars and certainly well under $1,000. That chasm in price helps explain why the United States is far and away the world leader in medical spending, even though numerous studies have concluded that Americans do not get better care.
Click here for the rest of the article.
In the article they mention $1,300 per month health premiums. Here in Belgium I pay $37 Euros per quarter.
"A major factor behind the high costs is that the United States, unique among industrialized nations, does not generally regulate or intervene in medical pricing..." As long as that remains true, any health "reform" will make no difference to the rising medical costs and the effects pon the US economy will be disastrous.
photo: Richard Harris
Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:
"Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:
"President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.
"The Justice Department's collection of journalists' phone records and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama's credibility as a champion of civil liberties - and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor."
You don't say! The Washington Post's breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: "I'm disgusted with this president." In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a "better-late-than-never" outlook regarding this newfound media awakening..."
Click here for the rest.
Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian:
"Due to the controversies over the IRS and (especially) the DOJ's attack on AP's news gathering process, media outlets have suddenly decided that President Obama has a very poor record on civil liberties, transparency, press freedoms, and a whole variety of other issues on which he based his first campaign. The first two paragraphs of this Washington Post article from yesterday, expressed in tones of recent epiphany, made me laugh audibly:
"President Obama, a former constitutional law lecturer who came to office pledging renewed respect for civil liberties, is today running an administration at odds with his résumé and preelection promises.
"The Justice Department's collection of journalists' phone records and the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups have challenged Obama's credibility as a champion of civil liberties - and as a president who would heal the country from damage done by his predecessor."
You don't say! The Washington Post's breaking news here is only about four years late. Back in mid-2010, ACLU executive director Anthony Romero, speaking about Obama's civil liberties record at a progressive conference, put it this way: "I'm disgusted with this president." In the spirit of optimism, one can adopt a "better-late-than-never" outlook regarding this newfound media awakening..."
Click here for the rest.
photo: Richard Harris
"The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950, according to data from Bloomberg. Today Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times regular workers on average, Bloomberg found. The ratio is up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950."
Click here for more.
"The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950, according to data from Bloomberg. Today Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times regular workers on average, Bloomberg found. The ratio is up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950."
Click here for more.