Expendables of a waning empire
December 31st, 2011
Archive
Archive for December, 2011
A Right to Discriminate
December 24th, 2011
By: Stephen Carter
Should it be illegal for a privately owned business to discriminate against people?
People discriminate every day. What instantly comes to mind with something like this is color of skin and gender. Discrimination can be any range of areas though, from looks, to speech, quality of clothes, pitch of voice, physical strength, etc. There are many things here that are discriminated against that people cannot control. Should we employ a bad singer over a good singer in order to avoid discrimination? Should we employ a weaker person over a very strong person to do a job that requires a lot of physical strength, just to avoid discrimination? How about the modeling business, isn’t that entire industry built on discrimination against ugly people? What of all female book clubs, doesn’t this discriminate against males? Scholarships that go to only black people? Businesses that will not hire people with visible tattoos or those who cannot pass a drug test but never show up to work inebriated? Read more…
Jurors Need to Know That They Can Say No
December 22nd, 2011
IF you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer.
The information I have just provided — about a constitutional doctrine called “jury nullification” — is absolutely true. But if federal prosecutors in New York get their way, telling the truth to potential jurors could result in a six-month prison sentence. Read More
Iraq conflict has killed a million Iraqis
December 19th, 2011
Bail-out Bombshell: Fed “Emergency” Bank Rescue Totaled $29 Trillion Over Three Years
December 17th, 2011
Here’s the hurricane: In reality, no less than $29.616 trillion is the total emergency assistance provided by the Fed to foreign and domestic entities during the Global Financial Crisis. Let’s repeat that: $29 trillion. This astounding number is over twice U.S. gross domestic product, the nominal value of all goods and services produced for the year 2010. Read More
People Locked in Tiny Cages, Crying in Pain: What I Saw and Heard When the LAPD Threw Me in Jail for Exercising My Right to Protest the Oligarchy
December 17th, 2011
“* I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
* The bus that I was shoved into didn’t move for at least an hour. The whole time we listened to the screams and crying from a young woman whom the cops locked into a tiny cage at the front of the bus. She was in agony, begging and pleading for one of the policemen to loosen her plastic handcuffs. A police officer sat a couple of feet away the entire time that she screamed–but wouldn’t lift a finger.
* Everyone on my bus felt her pain–literally felt it. That’s because the zip-tie handcuffs they use—like the ones you see on Iraq prisoners in Abu Ghraib—cut off your circulation and wedge deep through your skin, where they can do some serious nerve damage, if that’s the point. And it did seem to be the point. A couple of guys around me were writhing in agony in their hard plastic seats, hands handcuffed behind their back.
* The 100 protesters in my detainee group were kept handcuffed with their hands behind their backs for 7 hours, denied food and water and forced to sit/sleep on a concrete floor. Some were so tired they passed out face down on the cold and dirty concrete, hands tied behind their back. As a result of the tight cuffs, I wound up losing sensation in my left palm/thumb and still haven’t recovered it now, a day and a half after they finally took them off.” Read More
Bradley Manning Is “Almost Gone”
December 17th, 2011
Criminal Code Is Overgrown, Legal Experts Tell Panel
December 16th, 2011
My Pledge of Allegiance
December 14th, 2011
By: Stephen Carter
When I was in high school I always stood and always recited the Pledge of Allegiance because that was what I believed we were supposed to do. It was all I had ever known and I was just following what everyone else did. Some other students refused to participate though and they caught a lot of hell for it and I often felt that they didn’t deserve to be berated by teachers for refusing to participate since that was simply them exercising their freedom of choice.
When I got older though and I began to look at life and government differently, I realized a few things. Read more…
The New Deal Was A Failure: Hoover and FDR Prolonged the Great Depression with Big Government
December 14th, 2011
House Passes Davis’ REINS Act
December 13th, 2011
The REINS Act would require an up-or-down, standalone vote in Congress and the President’s signature on all new major rules before they can be enforced on the American people, job-creating small businesses, or State and local governments. Major rules are those that have an annual economic impact of $100 million or more. Read More
A Fast and Furious String of Government Failures
December 13th, 2011
US Attorney General Eric Holder is in hot water again over Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal agents with the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives lost track of hundreds of guns they had encouraged firearms dealers to sell to suspected traffickers. It’s the big sequel to BATFE’s Operation Wide Receiver in which multiple guns were sold to suspected cartel buyers under BATFE surveillance in 2006 and 2007.
But the plot thickens, and goes in a direction that probably shouldn’t be surprising: Documents obtained by CBS News strongly suggest that BATFE agents had intended to use Fast and Furious guns to support their demands for tighter administrative regulations on gun sales, particularly requiring dealers to report the sale of multiple rifles to the same person within a certain time period.
Where to even begin unraveling this one? Read More
Internet piracy bill: A free speech ‘kill switch’
December 13th, 2011
Patriot Act used to fight more drug dealers than terrorists
December 12th, 2011
The Student Loan Debt System
December 12th, 2011
How Doctors Die
December 12th, 2011
A Not So ‘Just’ Government
December 10th, 2011
By: Stephen Carter
It just doesn’t seem like you get much justice when it comes to dealing with the government, especially when you’re defending yourself from it.
Most have experienced this before, whether they realized it at the time or not, and it is remarkable that we have not conceived of something better, at the very least cried out against the injustice. When the government gets you in its sights, often the easiest thing to do at the time is comply and hope it goes away. What exactly are we talking about here you ask? Read more…
Cops Love Making Small-Time Marijuana Arrests; Here’s Why
December 10th, 2011
In sum, police departments are pressured to show productivity, and these kinds of arrests are relatively safe and easy, involving “clean,” high-quality arrestees. Moreover, these arrests provide good training for rookies, deliver overtime pay for cops, allow supervisors to account for their underlings, and act as a net to get as many people into the system as possible, all at a cost borne entirely by the victims — the arrestees. Read More
Ten Thousand Commandments
December 7th, 2011
An Annual Snapshot of the Federal Regulatory State 2011 Edition
An evaluation of the U.S. federal regulatory enterprise by economists Nicole V. Crain and W. Mark Crain finds annual regulatory compliance costs hit $1.752 trillion in 2008.
Given 2010’s actual government spending or outlays of $3.456 trillion, the regulatory “hidden tax” stands at an unprecedented 50.7 percent of the level of federal spending itself.
Regulations are killing the efficiency of the private sector.
Read the report here in pdf format
6 Shocking Revelations About Wall Street’s “Secret Government”
December 7th, 2011
We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. Through a freedom of information request by Bloomberg News, the public now has access to over 29,000 pages of Fed documents and 21,000 additional Fed transactions that were deliberately hidden, and for good reason. Read More
The video the US Army doesn’t want you to see
December 7th, 2011
Warning, if you have a weak stomach or break down easily emotionally, this video should not be viewed.
This is disturbing and depressing.
Kucinich bill seeks to end the Federal Reserve
December 4th, 2011
A bill put forward by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) would do what libertarians and conservatives have long wished for: effectively end the Federal Reserve.
The National Emergency Employment Defense (NEED) Act of 2011 would place the Federal Reserve, a private, qusai-governmental institution that controls the nation’s monetary policy, under control of the U.S. Treasury. It would also implement new rules for the financial industry, in hopes of ending the worst abuses that created the 2008 financial collapse and the ensuing recession. Read More
Police Officers Find That Dissent on Drug Laws May Come With a Price
December 4th, 2011
The Bogeyman
December 3rd, 2011
The growth of government is built on the back of fear, slowly strangling the rights of everyone and enriching the few at the expense of the many.
