Daily Topics - Monday 12 April 2010
By webmaster
KPOJ's Carl and Christine in for Thom.
Hour One: Financial crisis / reform / Greenspan rewriting history Carl and Christine talk with Andy Kroll, DC based Investigative journalist at Mother Jones Magazine.
Hour Two: Steven's retirement, future of the supreme court, replacements? - Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, author of several books including "Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent," and the forthcoming "The United States of Torture: America's Past and Present Policy of Interrogation and Abuse".
Hour Three: Nuclear summit today in DC Carl and Christine are joined by Lawrence Korb, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Senior Advisor to the Center for Defense Information.
Comments
#2
How come everyone agrees there should be laws to protect us from drunk drivers, yet the banksters try to argue there should be no laws to protect us from their greed driven drunkenous? In both cases the public at large suffers from the pile ups they cause.
#3
Gates Defends Soldiers in Iraq Shooting Video, Says Footage Lacks Context
FOXNews.com
Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Sunday defended the soldiers shown firing on a group of people near Baghdad in a classified military video released last week, saying the troops were caught in a "split-second" situation and the video doesn't show the "broader picture."
The broader picture is of course, that this was/is an illegal war of aggression based on lies from the get go. Gates/Obama & Co. have said that dead Iraqi civilians don't amount to diddily squat.
#4
Not only did a U.S. military helicopter gunship mow them down amid macho jokes and chuckling – after mistaking a couple of cameras for weapons – but the American attackers then blew away several Iraqis who arrived in a van and tried to take one of the wounded newsmen to a hospital. Two children in the van were badly wounded.
“Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle,” one American remarked.
The videotaped incident – entitled “Collateral Murder” by Wikileaks – occurred on July 12, 2007, in the midst of President Bush’s much-heralded troop “surge,” which the U.S. news media has widely credited for reducing violence in Iraq and bringing something close to victory for the United States.
But the U.S. press corps rarely mentions that the “surge” represented one of the bloodiest periods of the war. Beyond the horrific – and untallied – death toll of Iraqis, more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers died during Bush’s “surge” of an additional 30,000 troops into Iraq.
It’s also unclear that the “surge” deserves much if any credit for the gradual decline in Iraqi violence, which had already reached turning points in 2006 with the death of al-Qaeda leader Musab al-Zarqawi and the U.S.-funded Sunni Awakening against al-Qaeda in Iraq.
#5
It is just a dream but, Francis Boyle for Supreme Court Justice.
#6
Corporate Values Justices versus American Values Justices - Everyone on the Hartmann show needs to stop framing the supreme court justices as either Progressive/Liberal/Left or Conservative/Right and start using Corporate Values Justices versus American Values Justices and nominees.
#7
I would love to see Dennis Kacenth as the supreme court nominee the republicans will be hysterical love it. I think he would be a great pick for the country he would stand up to the republicans and the radical supreme court.
#8
The Death of Print Media is due to Lack of Content & Functional Illiteracy - Michael Moore.
http://fora.tv/2009/09/17/Filmmaker_Michael_Moore_on_Capitalism_A_Love_Story#chapter_07
The above link is a good 10 minute talk about how dumb our society has become any why. I like his explaination of "Liberals" as being moderates and "Progressives" as being more to the left.
#9
Check out Reine Eisler essay on the need for a new economy. .
Today's conventional economic models are and always have been incomplete, and therefore their failures are built-in...
http://www.alternet.org/vision/146173/roadmap_to_a_new_economics%3A_beyo...
[excerpt]
Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism
We can all be leaders in building a social and economic system that really meets human needs.
April 13, 2010
...
a truly new economic system, we need a broader definition of human capacity development than a purely economic one. Which brings us back to the children and to our human capacities for caring, empathy, consciousness, and creativity.
When children are the starting point for a new economic paradigm, the first step is to go beyond the tired debate of capitalism versus socialism and all the other old isms. Both capitalist and socialist theory ignore a fundamental truth: the real wealth of nations -- and the world -- consists of the contributions of people and nature.
Adam Smith and Karl Marx ignored the vital importance of nature's life-sustaining activities. For them, nature exists to be exploited, period. As for the life-sustaining activities of caring for people starting in childhood, they considered this merely "reproductive" labor, and not part of their "productive" economic equation.
In other words, their focus was on the market -- for Smith to extol it and for Marx to excoriate it. Neither included in his economic model the life-sustaining sectors, without which there would be no market economy: the household economy, the natural economy, and the volunteer economy.
The first step toward building a truly new economics is a full-spectrum economic model that includes these sectors and gives real visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and for our natural environment.
The move to this comprehensive economic model in turn requires understanding something else ignored in conventional economic discussions. This is that economic systems don't arise in a vacuum: they are influenced by, and in turn influence, the larger cultural system in which they are embedded.
[end excerpt]
#10
New blog?
Happy tuesday....
#11
re: Limbautomies and Beckerwoods: I was telling my friend Dave about these names we made up Fri., and when i said 'Beck", he immediately came up with "Beckerwoods". Great minds think I like.
#12
Molly Ivins commented on the people who were "too rich to go to jail." She's reaching from beyond the grave to point a finger at Blankenship.
#13
The poor get the needle, the rich get the Betty Ford Clinic.
#14
No, Barack Obama is not the second coming of Pol Pot. However, he is far too much the continuation of GWB for my liking. The comments of Bob Gates concerning the WikiLeaks released video of a US helicopter gunship mowing down Iraqi civilians in a war that was based on lies, serve to show that where the US crimes are concerned, nothing has changed.
War Crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan
War crimes, massacres, and, as Al Jazeera properly calls it, "collateral murder," are all part of the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001.
The release last week of the Wikileaks video, thirty-eight grisly minutes long, of US airmen casually slaughtering a dozen Iraqis in 2007 -- including two Reuters newsmen -- puts it into focus not because it shows us something we didn't know, but because we can watch it unfold in real time. Real people, flesh and blood, gunned down from above in a hellish rain of fire.
The events in Iraq, nearly three years old, were repeated this week in Afghanistan, when trigger-happy US soldiers slaughtered five Afghans cruising along on a huge, comfortable civilian bus near Kandahar.
As the New York Times reports:
"American troops raked a large passenger bus with gunfire near Kandahar on Monday morning, killing and wounding civilians, and igniting angry anti-American demonstrations in a city where winning over Afghan support is pivotal to the war effort."
The Kandahar incident is only one of many, of course. Over the past year, dozens of Afghans have similarly died in checkpoint and roadside killings. Not one, not a single one, of these murders involved hostile forces. In other words, when the smoke and dust cleared, in all of the cases over the past year the bodies recovered were those of innocents.
#15
Whatever happened to banishment? It might be useful. If no country would take our refuse, there's always Antarctica - by agreement no country can claim the land.
#16
new blog up...
#17
The lesson of the fable, "The Grasshopper and The Ant" is missed by most. The Ant is a member of a socialized community. The Grasshopper is on his own, regardless of his attitude. Society is proved to be superior. The Ant, having only a limited specialty, is nothing without her community.
#18
In five years of teaching in public schools, I observed that a big part of our educational system is about crowd control.
Thom's Blog Is On the Move
By webmaster
Hello All
Thom's blog in this space and moving to a new home.
Please follow us across to hartmannreport.com - this will be the only place going forward to read Thom's blog posts and articles.
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Thom & Louise at a "private audience" with His Holiness Pope John Paul II at his summer palace, Castle Gandolfo, Italy
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Re: Financial crisis
I find it amusing when the banks claim to loose money (and ask for a bail out). How can you loose something that did not exist in the first place? It's all created out of thin air...