Argentina Seizes the Central Bank
From WSJ:
After a month of wrangling, Argentine President Cristina Kirchner succeeded in sacking central bank President Martin Redrado last week. In his place she named Mercedes Marcó del Pont, a Yale-trained economist who has expressed the view that central bank autonomy ought to be limited.
The opposition howled at the news. Felipe Sola, former governor of Provincia de Buenos Aires, warned that the new bank president “is going to do what the executive decides and they are going to modify the bank charter to justify her doing what the executive tells her.”
Of course that would seem to be the point. Mr. Redrado was fired because he refused to turn over $6.6 billion in bank reserves to Mrs. Kirchner, who wants to pay foreign creditors but doesn’t want to use treasury revenues.…
In Wake of Ruling, Wall Street CEOs Form Conservative ‘Action Tank’
From The Raw Story:
Just three weeks ago, the United States Supreme Court ended a ban on corporate spending in political elections, drawing intense criticism for the ruling’s potential to erode the democratic process.
This week, a group that includes some of the wealthiest Republican CEOs on Wall Street have formed a group to take advantage of new fundraising possibilities for the GOP.
The Supreme Court ruling could potentially allow the group, called the American Action Network, to take unlimited contributions from corporations for use in political campaigns.
“This administration as well as Citizens United [the Supreme Court ruling] — when you combine the two the prospects for funding these types of efforts are greatly enhanced,” said Norm Coleman, one of the group’s organizers.
Coleman called the group an “action tank” or a “think-and-do tank.”
[Read more at The…
The FBI Wants To Log Everything You Do Online
Samuel Axon writes on Mashable:
FBI Director Robert Mueller wants ISPs to track “origin and destination information” about their customers’ browsing habits and store them for authorities’ use for two years, according to a CNET report.
That would mean monitoring the IP addresses, domains and exact websites users visit, and then storing that information for months. If officials who support this measure get their way, federal, state and local law enforcement would be able to access the information via search warrant or subpoena.
Access to exact URLs would require deep-packet inspection, which could be a violation of the Wiretap Act. The courts would end up having to make a ruling one way or the other if authorities try it.
The argument in favor is that the FBI has long been able to do this…
On the Claimed “War Exception” to the Constitution
From Salon:
Last week, I wrote about a revelation buried in a Washington Post article by Dana Priest which described how the Obama administration has adopted the Bush policy of targeting selected American citizens for assassination if they are deemed (by the Executive Branch) to be Terrorists. As The Washington Times‘ Eli Lake reports, Adm. Dennis Blair was asked about this program at a Congressional hearing yesterday and he acknowledged its existence:
The U.S. intelligence community policy on killing American citizens who have joined al Qaeda requires first obtaining high-level government approval, a senior official disclosed to Congress on Wednesday.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair said in each case a decision to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen must get special permission. . . .
He also said there are criteria that must be met to authorize the killing…
Lawrence Lessig: How to Get Our Democracy Back
Lawrence Lessig writes in the Nation:
Editors’ Note: We encourage readers moved by this essay to sign the Change Congress petition, a drive to enact solutions proposed in this article. Click here to sign. A video commentary by Professor Lessig can be viewed here.
We should remember what it felt like one year ago, as the ability to recall it emotionally will pass and it is an emotional memory as much as anything else. It was a moment rare in a democracy’s history. The feeling was palpable — to supporters and opponents alike — that something important had happened. America had elected, the young candidate promised, a transformational president. And wrapped in a campaign that had produced the biggest influx of new voters and small-dollar contributions in a generation, the claim seemed…
Ron Paul Comments on Americans Told to Consider Killing Other Americans
From the Daily Paul:
Dr. Paul is referring to Anwar al Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and is now a Muslim cleric in Yemen. Apparently Anwar is well on his way to become the first U.S citizen on the CIA’s official target list.
Vermont Legislature Considers Eugenics Apology
Most people don’t realize that many of the terrible eugenics and marriage laws that characterized Nazi Germany trace their origin back to the United States. It’s hard to see our history clearly, and this story is a step in the right direction.
From Burlington Free Press:
If the state of Vermont had carried out a plan to sterilize his grandmother, Don Stevens said Tuesday, he “wouldn’t be here.”Many Vermonters of mixed French Canadian and American Indian heritage, like Stevens’ grandmother, as well as poor, rural whites, were placed on a state-sanctioned list of “mental defectives” and degenerates in the 1930s and placed in state institutions like the Home for the Feeble Minded in Brandon.
Some had surgery after Gov. Stanley Wilson in 1931 won enactment of a sterilization law. It was designed to…
Patriot Act – Eight Years Later
From Truthout:
After 2009 – a year when federal prosecutors charged more suspects with terrorism than in any year since the attacks of September 11, 2001 – and in today’s atmosphere of heightened fear triggered by the aborted plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, Congress will begin again this month to consider reauthorization of key parts of the USA Patriot Act.
The act was passed by a frightened Congress, with very little debate, just 45 days after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the hijacked airliner that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Only one US senator – Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin – voted against the legislation.
Three sections of the Act were due to “sunset” – expire, unless reauthorized – on December 31 of…
Loose Lips or Dirty Tricks?
From Slate:
Game Change provides more evidence of the Clintons’ shocking behavior during the 2008 campaign.
The inevitable grumbling and grunting about the use of unattributed quotations in Game Change, the engrossing new campaign book by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, has been accompanied by a more or less grudging general admission that nobody cited in these pages has so far complained of being misrepresented. To this suggestive point I would add, from comparatively limited experience, that where the authors discuss anything that I know about, they have it right. In fact, what they say is often less sensational than what they might have said.Surely this is particularly true of the most notorious rapid-response operation in modern political history: the infamous Clinton team and its eager outriders and propagandists. I am…
Why Are Americans Passive as Millions Lose Their Homes, Jobs, Families and the American Dream?
Society-wide depression has struck America. Why it’s happened and what we can do about it. This is the cover article for the January/February issue of Tikkun magazine. For more on the article and the magazine go here.
An unnatural economic and psychological disaster has struck America. Five contributors, each interacting with and shaping the others, have devastated the American moral, economic, psychological, and social landscape. Each is fed by related streams, but each contributes its own force to the disaster. The American dream in which each generation surpassed the previous generation in real wages has all but disappeared, along with dreams of an intact family, a steady job, a home, and an honest supportive community.
This article looks at each of five collaborators in the crisis in order to answer the…
If Joe Biden Saw ‘Avatar’ in 2D, That’s Fine With Me…
You know, if Joe Biden has so much on his mind that he didn’t notice the movie, that’s a good sign for a public official. Via New York magazine’s website:
Vice-President Joe Biden stopped by MSNBC this afternoon to chat about important domestic and foreign-policy issues with Andrea Mitchell, but he was disappointingly less gaffe-tastic than we’d hoped. Nevertheless, we were delighted by Biden’s answer about his pick for Best Picture Oscar, Avatar. “I think one of the odds on favorites … is um, is uh, this uh, this, this, this new program that I looked at and wished I was seeing it in 3-D, and you sit there and you watch this science-fiction thing unfold in front of you,” he said, with adorable wonder and excitement. “The magic of it is kind of overwhelming.”
YouTube Censors Marijuana Question In Obama Interview
Thanks Steve for the news tip! Steve Elliott writes in the Toke of the Town:
If you voted for marijuana as a CitizenTube question, then your vote didn’t count. Yes, questions about marijuana were the most popular in the CitizenTube voting Monday afternoon.
But YouTube, in a gutless move, decided at the last minute not to present the highest ranked questions to the President. Initial reports that the President had ignored the marijuana questions were inaccurate; YouTube took pot, the top vote getter, out of the running.
President Obama never even got an opportunity to answer the most popular question of all.
Wait, what? “We’ll let you vote, but don’t expect it to actually MEAN anything.”
If they were going to ignore the questions that got the most votes, then why, exactly, did YouTube ask viewers to…
Report: No sanctions for Lawyers who OK’d Torture
Is anyone surprised at this report? Is anyone not disgusted?
From Yahoo News:
Bush administration lawyers who drafted legal theories that led to waterboarding and other harsh treatment of terrorism suspects showed poor judgment but won’t face sanctions for professional misconduct, according to a published report.A forthcoming government ethics report initially concluded the two key authors of the so-called torture memos, Jay Bybee and John Yoo, who were officials in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush administration, had violated their professional obligations as lawyers when they crafted the memos that allowed the use of harsh interrogation tactics.
But a senior Justice Department official, David Margolis, later softened the department’s finding to say the authors simply showed poor judgment, Newsweek reported.
[Read more at Yahoo News]
…
Meet the People of Vermont Who Want to Secede from the Union
Christopher Ketcham writes on Time.com:
The President on Wednesday may have reassured Americans that the state of the Union is “strong,” but, just the week before, a group of Vermont secessionists declared their intention to seek political power in a quest to get their state to quit the Union altogether.
On Jan. 15, in the state capital of Montpelier, nine candidates for statewide office gathered in a tiny room at the Capitol Plaza Hotel, to announce they wanted a divorce from the United States of America. “For the first time in over 150 years, secession and political independence from the U.S. will be front and center in a statewide New England political campaign,” said Thomas Naylor, 73, one of the leaders of the campaign.
A former Duke University economics professor, Naylor heads up…
Illegal Warrantless Eavesdropping Still Unaddressed by Courts and Congress
David Kravets writes on Wired’s Threat Level:
Heads spun four years ago this weekend, when AT&T was accused of funneling every one of its customers’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — without warrants. A Jan. 31, 2006, lawsuit alleged major violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Such a sweeping breach seemed far-fetched.
Yet months after the lawsuit was lodged, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices connected to the NSA, which was siphoning all internet traffic, from e-mails to Voice Over Internet Protocol phone conversations.
But four years and a mountain of court briefs and rulings later, the legal system has never addressed the merits of the allegations — and likely never will. Even Congress…
WikiLeaks Shuts Due to Lack of Funds, Hopes to be Back Soon
From Google News:
Whistleblower website WikiLeaks has temporarily shut down because of financial difficulties.WikiLeaks.org announced it was suspending operations in a message on its homepage that included an appeal to the public for donations.
“To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, but will be back soon,” it said.
WikiLeaks, which relies on public contributions for much of its funding, said it had raised “just over 130,000 dollars for this year but cannot meaningfully continue operations until costs are covered.”
It said its costs are 200,000 dollars a year and 600,000 dollars a year if staff are paid.
WikiLeaks, run by Sunshine Press, describes itself as a “non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public.”
[Read more at Google…
Sarah Palin’s Tea Party Dinner Disaster
Like most Disinfo readers, the prospect of Sarah Palin becoming president in 2012 would seem to fulfill all the worst interpretations of both Bible and Mayan philosophy. Well, before you jump off of a bridge, read this story. Who doesn’t realize that she is a joke?
From Mother Jones:
Will Sarah Palin’s Tea Party dinner be a bust?
Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips likely assumed that scoring a dinner speech by the former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate would guarantee a huge turnout for his National Tea Party Convention, scheduled to start Feb. 4 at Nashville’s Gaylord Opryland Hotel. But according to Tea Party insiders, the tickets for the Palin banquet aren’t selling—and some conservative activists who have already paid to attend are now demanding refunds. With the controversial event shaping…
Presidential Assassinations of U.S. Citizens
From Salon:
The Washington Post’s Dana Priest today reports that “U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people.” That’s no surprise, of course, as Yemen is now another predominantly Muslim country (along with Somalia and Pakistan) in which our military is secretly involved to some unknown degree in combat operations without any declaration of war, without any public debate, and arguably (though not clearly) without any Congressional authorization. The exact role played by the U.S. in the late-December missile attacks in Yemen, which killed numerous civilians, is still unknown.
But buried in Priest’s article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret “hit list” of people whom the President has personally authorized to be…
