American Politics

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Andrew~ said:
And the Democrats are little angels who get their money from crowd-funding campaigns on Kickstarter. :rolleyes:

The Citizens United case was just fine. The people who are after real influence don't really care who gets into power, they'll privileged access to every congressman and senator anyway.
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Perhaps you should try reading his post properly before going off on a rant.

while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class
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niMic said:
I'm having an irony-attack.
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The double standard of the right wing over the Pope is hilarious. They haven't been able to praise JPII enough for his stance against communism and 'socialism', but the moment Francis draws attention to the flaws in capitalism, they get their knickers in a twist and claim he should keep his nose out of politics and economics.
 
Ted Cruz, hero of the tea party is worth a few million. The trouble is the system is set up so that the wealthy have a huge advantage when running for office. Every now and then some poor schmuck will get elected but they are generally grifting their way through the game or get corrupted.
 
Doesn't bother me when another attacks my stance either thoroughly reading or just reacting on a whim. Citizens United is a horrendous travesty placed on the public by the judicial system. It only benefits the corporate elite and their wealthy benefactors. Does nothing for the common folk. A corporation is not an individual.
 
Red Dreams said:
only Angels should run for office then.. :smirk:

Just accept Republican politicians are scum and they have morons who are being screwed still voting for them.
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The hate is getting stronger in you. Remember what Dick Nixon said about that in his resignation speech.
 
Typical lower level politics. This clown is in my local district.

http://www.macon.com/2013/12/16/2836525/us-rep-scott-blasts-senate-affordable.html

---Scott said blame for congressional inaction should fall on the Senate, and he cited the House of Representatives passage of a National Defense Authorization Act bill, which specifies the budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Senate’s failure to bring that bill to a vote.---

---“I’m one of those who would love to repeal it and replace it,” Scott said Monday of the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

In presenting the impacts of the law, Scott said 5 million Americans will lose their current health plans and that some Americans are seeing premium increases of as much as 400 percent.

Media reports suggest millions of Americans are being sent cancelation letters from their insurers, but estimates vary as to how many. Scott’s 5 million figure comes from Fred Upton, R-Mich., the chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee.

The 400-percent premium increase figure also comes from the Energy & Commerce Committee, which sent letters in March to 17 of the largest health insurance companies in the country and asked them for an analysis of possible premium increases. The report, published in May, estimated premiums for Georgians would increase between 15 percent in large group markets to 145 percent in individual markets.---
 
Even in states that have subscribed to ACA, it has been no fun. Many people are frustrated and angry. But I believe in 3 or 4 months when everyone who needs health coverage is covered, the word will get around and those who tried to implement it will be commended. The is a massive project that was never going to be easy to roll out.
 
Red Dreams said:
Even in states that have subscribed to ACA, it has been no fun. Many people are frustrated and angry. But I believe in 3 or 4 months when everyone who needs health coverage is covered, the word will get around and those who tried to implement it will be commended. The is a massive project that was never going to be easy to roll out.
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Only the freeloaders are happy with the ACA since they get 100% coverage and don't pay a dime. Insurance is wrong or we get real free healthcare or leave it the way we had. Whats the point for some people to pay over $300 a month when the first $6000 comes from their pockets?
 
barros said:
Only the freeloaders are happy with the ACA since they get 100% coverage and don't pay a dime. Insurance is wrong or we get real free healthcare or leave it the way we had. Whats the point for some people to pay over $300 a month when the first $6000 comes from their pockets?
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There is no such thing as Free Health Care. Single payer is Not free...Yes. Insurance is wrong. But will republicans vote for it. Insurance companies make obsecene profits because politicians are in their pockets.

Show some compassion for people who are just trying to survive....freeloaders????
 
Red Dreams said:
There is no such thing as Free Health Care. Single payer is Not free...Yes. Insurance is wrong. But will republicans vote for it. Insurance companies make obsecene profits because politicians are in their pockets.

Show some compassion for people who are just trying to survive....freeloaders????
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Yes, this winds me up. It's not fecking free.
 
before the ACA, when an uninsured person goes to the emergency, the taxpayer is paying for the expense. So everything was not ok before...it was far worse. What people need to know is the insurance companies spend many millions on propaganda to convince even educated people that uninsured people were the reason for health care expnses going up...when in reality it is teh insurance companies that are spending these millions...from premiums they collect from us to spread their lies...while they make obscene profits for just being a broker.

Righties need to start thinking instead of just buying garbage as news and information.
 
If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.
Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.
The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."
This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.
Though this was not stated explicitly, the government's rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a "systemically important institution" in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:
Federal and state authorities have chosen not to indict HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.​
It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderersand terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way.
And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud. This is from Breuer's announcement:
As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement.​
Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fecking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?
So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?
How about all of it?How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.
Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.
It'd be interesting, for instance, to ask the residents of Tenaha, Texas what they think about the HSBC settlement. That's the town where local police routinely pulled over (mostly black) motorists and, whenever they found cash, offered motorists a choice: They could either allow police to seize the money, or face drug and money laundering charges.
Or we could ask Anthony Smelley, the Indiana resident who won $50,000 in a car accident settlement and was carrying about $17K of that in cash in his car when he got pulled over. Cops searched his car and had drug dogs sniff around: The dogs alerted twice. No drugs were found, but police took the money anyway. Even after Smelley produced documentation proving where he got the money from, Putnam County officials tried to keep the money on the grounds that he could have used the cash to buy drugs in the future.
Seriously, that happened. It happens all the time, and even Lanny Breuer's own Justice Deparment gets into the act. In 2010 alone, U.S. Attorneys' offices deposited nearly $1.8 billion into government accounts as a result of forfeiture cases, most of them drug cases. You can see the Justice Department's own statistics right here:
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Justice Department​
 
If you get pulled over in America with cash and the government even thinks it's drug money, that cash is going to be buying your local sheriff or police chief a new Ford Expedition tomorrow afternoon.

And that's just the icing on the cake. The real prize you get for interacting with a law enforcement officer, if you happen to be connected in any way with drugs, is a preposterous, outsized criminal penalty. Right here in New York, one out of every seven cases that ends up in court is a marijuana case.
Just the other day, while Breuer was announcing his slap on the wrist for the world's most prolific drug-launderers, I was in arraignment court in Brooklyn watching how they deal with actual people. A public defender explained the absurdity of drug arrests in this city. New York actually has fairly liberal laws about pot – police aren't supposed to bust you if you possess the drug in private. So how do police work around that to make 50,377 pot-related arrests in a single year, just in this city? Tthat was 2010; the 2009 number was 46,492.)
"What they do is, they stop you on the street and tell you to empty your pockets," the public defender explained. "Then the instant a pipe or a seed is out of the pocket – boom, it's 'public use.' And you get arrested."
People spend nights in jail, or worse. In New York, even if they let you off with a misdemeanor and time served, you have to pay $200 and have your DNA extracted – a process that you have to pay for (it costs 50 bucks). But even beyond that, you won't have search very far for stories of draconian, idiotic sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.
Just ask Cameron Douglas, the son of Michael Douglas, who got five years in jail for simple possession. His jailers kept him in solitary for 23 hours a day for 11 months and denied him visits with family and friends. Although your typical non-violent drug inmate isn't the white child of a celebrity, he's usually a minority user who gets far stiffer sentences than rich white kids would for committing the same crimes – we all remember the crack-versus-coke controversy in which federal and state sentencing guidelines left (predominantly minority) crack users serving sentences up to 100 times harsher than those meted out to the predominantly white users of powdered coke.
The institutional bias in the crack sentencing guidelines was a racist outrage, but this HSBC settlement blows even that away. By eschewing criminal prosecutions of major drug launderers on the grounds (the patently absurd grounds, incidentally) that their prosecution might imperil the world financial system, the government has now formalized the double standard.
They're now saying that if you're not an important cog in the global financial system, you can't get away with anything, not even simple possession. You will be jailed and whatever cash they find on you they'll seize on the spot, and convert into new cruisers or toys for your local SWAT team, which will be deployed to kick in the doors of houses where more such inessential economic cogs as you live. If you don't have a systemically important job, in other words, the government's position is that your assets may be used to finance your own political disenfranchisement.
On the other hand, if you are an important person, and you work for a big international bank, you won't be prosecuted even if you launder nine billion dollars. Even if you actively collude with the people at the very top of the international narcotics trade, your punishment will be far smaller than that of the person at the very bottom of the world drug pyramid. You will be treated with more deference and sympathy than a junkie passing out on a subway car in Manhattan (using two seats of a subway car is a common prosecutable offense in this city). An international drug trafficker is a criminal and usually a murderer; the drug addict walking the street is one of his victims. But thanks to Breuer, we're now in the business, officially, of jailing the victims and enabling the criminals.
This is the disgrace to end all disgraces. It doesn't even make any sense. There is no reason why the Justice Department couldn't have snatched up everybody at HSBC involved with the trafficking, prosecuted them criminally, and worked with banking regulators to make sure that the bank survived the transition to new management. As it is, HSBC has had to replace virtually all of its senior management. The guilty parties were apparently not so important to the stability of the world economy that they all had to be left at their desks.
So there is absolutely no reason they couldn't all face criminal penalties. That they are not being prosecuted is cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else. And by approving this settlement, Breuer removed the government's moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn't already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.


Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...the-drug-war-is-a-joke-20121213#ixzz2oyEhOVSC
 
I'm not a fan of the vitriolic writing, but the points are sound.

For anyone interested in an in depth study of drug policy, I'd recommend Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow". I wouldn't say I agree with every bit of it, but it's a very good read about the history of the drug war and the ruinous affect it's had on urban minority societies. I was a slow convert to selective legalization, but her book won me over.
 
barros said:
Only the freeloaders are happy with the ACA since they get 100% coverage and don't pay a dime. Insurance is wrong or we get real free healthcare or leave it the way we had. Whats the point for some people to pay over $300 a month when the first $6000 comes from their pockets?
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I've been insured for years and I'm perfectly happy with ACA. But that's only because I believe I'm part of a society.
 
barros said:
Only the freeloaders are happy with the ACA since they get 100% coverage and don't pay a dime. Insurance is wrong or we get real free healthcare or leave it the way we had. Whats the point for some people to pay over $300 a month when the first $6000 comes from their pockets?
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I yearn for the day when freeloaders will also be considered as all those sucking off the massive, massive pentagon and imperial Amerika war tit, and freeloading off all those incredibly expensive military industrial complex contracts, and those cashing in on the drug war and getting rich locking up minorities into the prison industrial complex, having a field day on NSA budgets and contracts tit, and all those freeloading politicians spending most of their time fundraising and getting juicy kickbacks from the corporations whose bidding their doing, and that fantastic new freeloading schtick of fleecing billionaires for right wing think tanks and policies and tea party fund raising . . .
 
Nobby style said:
I yearn for the day when freeloaders will also be considered as all those sucking off the massive, massive pentagon and imperial Amerika war tit, and freeloading off all those incredibly expensive military industrial complex contracts, and those cashing in on the drug war and getting rich locking up minorities into the prison industrial complex, having a field day on NSA budgets and contracts tit, and all those freeloading politicians spending most of their time fundraising and getting juicy kickbacks from the corporations whose bidding their doing, and that fantastic new freeloading schtick of fleecing billionaires for right wing think tanks and policies and tea party fund raising . . .
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) is leading a class-action lawsuit with hundreds of thousands of Americans against President Barack Obama’s National Security Agency (NSA) over its spying on the American people, Breitbart News has learned.

Sen. Paul will be discussing the lawsuit in an exclusive appearance on Fox News with host Eric Bolling at 10 PM ET on Friday. Breitbart News has learned that Paul will file the class action lawsuit soon in the D.C. District Court and that he will be filing it as an individual, not as a U.S. Senator. For a U.S. Senator to file a such a class action lawsuit against the President of the United States would be extremely rare.
With regard to NSA spying, this is the first class action lawsuit against such activity. This allows the American people to join together in a grassroots manner against President Obama’s NSA for the first time in the legal system, as all other lawsuits have been individuals suing against the agency.
The focus of the lawsuit will be how the NSA's actions violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. The lawsuit will target the NSA’s metadata program.
Via Paul’s campaign website, more than 300,000 Americans have already indicated they will sign up for the suit when it is officially filed in D.C. District court. Americans can join the lawsuit by visiting Paul’s website.
The class action suit from Sen. Paul against the president comes on the heels of two different conflicting court rulings in individual suits against the NSA, with one court ruling that the NSA was within its bounds to spy on Americans shortly after a different court ruled the NSA’s actions were unconstitutional. The conflicting decisions all but guarantee an eventual Supreme Court-level case on the matter.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/03/Rand-Paul-to-Sue-Obama-over-NSA-Spying

Obviously ridiculous to sue Obama, given he's just the schmuck in office at the moment but Rand Paul has somehow managed to be on the correct side of an argument for once.
 
Mentioning the President is simply to con the righties that Paul is their guy in 2016 (he'll no doubt use that as his tough stance on socialism and whatnot). Yawn.
 
I don't understand this. It's ok for America to spy on the interweb with international users for the sake of security, but it's a problem if Americans are spied on and there's a class action suit? I do understand that this is action against bulk monitoring of phone records, but I don't get this logic. This world doesn't spin around America, snooping and spying is a problem, period. I've heard Americans (some very good friends) go batshit crazy at the prospect of their homes being monitored, but they are ok with the middle east and Asia being monitored. feck you.
 
People are selfish. Regardless of the country people are from, they're going to be okay with their intelligence services spying on others despite not being okay with being monitored themselves.
 
Republicans love these 'give-a-shit' campaigns, don't they? Whether you're talking about their attempt at impeaching Clinton body gave a toss about, their Benghazi 'unanswered questions' nobody seems to care about...it's like they try their hardest to pick an issue that fewest people as possible are actually going to give a shit about. It's quite impressive but probably why they've only won one of the last five Presidential elections on the popular vote.
 
I personally don't care if they if they listen to my calls, read my emails and texts, track my internet usage - I have nothing to hide. It is indeed the self-righteous assholes that complain about anything and everything.
 
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