The Problem With Money in Politics - Lawrence Lessig, Harvard Law. Park Avenue Alex Gibney, 740 Park Avenue, New York City, New York, Verenigde Staten. Hedges v. Obama NDAA Lawsuit Press Conference, 2/6/2013. PREDPOL: PREdictive POLicing. OWS to Assange: Outbreak of democracy US govt's biggest fear.
Stemmen in de VS geen gemakkelijke opgave: de obstakels op een rij - Buitenland. 01/11/12, 13:00 − bron: ANP © reuters. Romney op campagne De Amerikaanse verkiezingen op 6 november worden door de staten afzonderlijk georganiseerd. Die hebben ieder hun eigen regels. Ook binnen de staten kunnen de procedures variëren. Een aantal factoren die tot problemen kunnen leiden: - Kiezersregistratie: In een aantal staten kunnen kiezers zich op de dag van de stembusgang inschrijven, terwijl in de meeste staten de registratie eerder eindigt. . - Identificatie: Volgens de federale wet moeten kiezers die voor de eerste keer hun stem willen uitbrengen eerst een geldig identiteitsbewijs overleggen.
. - Problemen bij stembureaus: die kunnen variëren van stemmachines die niet werken, een ongewoon hoge opkomst, een gebrek aan stembureaumedewerkers tot een tekort aan stembiljetten. . - Stemmentelling: kleine verschillen kunnen tot hertellingen leiden. Democracy:Upgrade by Jodi Rose on Prezi. ‘Waarom zou ik u inzicht geven in mijn agenda?’ Lang niet alle Europarlementariërs waren bereid mee te werken aan ons transparantie-onderzoek. Sophie in 't Veld (D66) wil er geen tijd voor vrijmaken. Opvallend voor een volksvertegenwoordiger die bij de laatste Europese verkiezingen nog pleitte voor 'een transparanter Europa, met meer democratische controle op het Europees bestuur.' Haar fractiegenoot Marietje Schaake is wel enthousiast.
Ze zegt zich hard te willen maken voor meer transparantie. Nieuwe gedragscode Sinds januari 2012 is er een nieuwe gedragscode in het Europarlement van kracht die het openbaar maken van nevenfuncties verplicht stelt. Inzicht in de agenda geven heeft voor veel parlementariërs dus geen prioriteit. De opstelling van deze Europarlementariërs is vreemd. Definitieproblemen Uit ons eigen onderzoek blijkt dat Nederlandse Europarlementariërs weinig nevenfuncties hebben. De schattingen over het aantal lobbyisten in Brussel lopen uiteen van 15.000 tot 25.000. NGO's en multinationals Gratis reisjes Rectificatie. Bankia: Responsibility Matters - en.ElConfidencial.com. J. Luis Martín.- 05/14/2012 Last week, the Spanish government carried out the biggest financial bailout since the outbreak of the economic crisis . BFA-Bankia ( BKIA ), the giant which resulted from the merger of seven savings banks only a year and a half ago, was nationalized by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy ’s government through the conversion of a 4.5 billion euro holding of preferential shares into equity.
As part of the bailout, and as part of a more comprehensive effort to reform the country’s ailing financial sector announced on Friday, the bank will need to provision additional taxpayers’ money (7-10 billion), which will come in the form of contingency bonds (CoCos). Bankia has put Spain’s financial system under scrutiny from investors and analysts worldwide who worry about the country’s capacity to strengthen its banks while adopting harsh fiscal consolidation policies in the midst of a recession. Too intimate a relationship Going systemic Responsibility matters J. A reminder about WikiLeaks. “Just in time to spoil the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, the Obama Justice Department is trying to do what Richard Nixon couldn’t: indict a media organization. . . . Charging Julian Assange with ‘conspiracy to commit espionage’ would effectively be setting a precedent with a charge that more accurately could be characterized as ‘conspiracy to commit journalism‘” — James Goodale, General Counsel of The New York Times during its Pentagon Papers fight with the Nixon administration, writing in The Daily Beast, June 12, 2011.
When, many years ago, I first read about the Nixon administration’s infamous break-in to the office of Daniel Ellberg’s psychiatrist as a means to discredit the Pentagon Papers leak, I was baffled by the motivation. The Pentagon Papers revealed systematic lying on the part of the U.S. Government to the American public about the Vietnam War. It’s vital that this not be permitted to happen. Cameron family fortune made in tax havens | Politics. David Cameron's father ran a network of offshore investment funds to help build the family fortune that paid for the prime minister's inheritance, the Guardian can reveal. Though entirely legal, the funds were set up in tax havens such as Panama City and Geneva, and explicitly boasted of their ability to remain outside UK tax jurisdiction. At the time of his death in late 2010, Ian Cameron left a fortune of £2.74m in his will, from which David Cameron received the sum of £300,000.
Cameron and other cabinet members have recently suggested that they would be willing to disclose their personal tax filings amid growing scrutiny following the budget, but this would only shed light on annual sources of income rather than accumulated wealth or inheritance. The structure employed by Cameron senior is now commonplace among modern hedge funds, which argue that offshore status can help attract international investors. An Interactive Map of the Dark-Money Universe.
Tracking the flow and impact of money in politics has long been one of Mother Jones' main beats. Since the 2010 Citizens United decision paved the way for a new era of bottomless election spending, we've been focused on what we call "dark money"—the hundreds of millions of dollars being dropped by outside groups, much of it without full disclosure of where it's coming from. The key players in this new world are super-PACs, which may raise and spend unlimited sums of money for or against candidates; and 501(c) nonprofit groups, which may make political ads and give money to super-PACs without disclosing their donors.
We wanted to visualize the major super-PACs and 501(c)s in a way that would provide both a good overview of outside spending in this election cycle as well as detailed information about each group. The current version of this chart shows just one slice of the dark-money universe: There are hundreds of smaller super-PACs and 501(c)s that are not included in this version. Lawrence Lessig explains how money corrupts Congress | Harvard Magazine Jul-Aug 2012. For a decade, Lawrence Lessig, a mild-seeming legal scholar, pursued the intricacies of updating American copyright law to reflect the rise of the digital era, the Internet, and new means of producing and disseminating texts, music, images, and software. Based first at Harvard, then Stanford, he co-founded organizations such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit that gives people legal tools to control use of their creative output, and argued that mashups (of songs or YouTube videos, for example) are culturally important products that (in some circumstances) can be legal under the principle of fair use.
He felt he was making progress: “The public was getting it. Businesses were getting it. Universities. As long as Congress remains in the thrall of “the economy of influence”—its members dependent on money to fund reelection campaigns—“no progress would be made on copyright or any other public-policy question,” he explains. “A Republic, if You Can Keep It” In the Hands of the People. CATASTROIKA - ENGLISH SUBTITLES. Jeff Connaughton The Payoff Justice Department And Wall Street. FinSpy Software Is Tracking Political Dissidents. RAP NEWS 15: Big Brother is WWWatching You. US democracy: The power of money - Empire.
The US presidential elections in November 2012 are expected to become the most expensive in history. One estimate by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) goes as high as $11bn. The vast majority of this political money has come from a handful of super-rich supporters of the Republican Party dwarfing the attempts by citizens, associations or labour unions to do the same. Many on the right claim deregulating campaign financing as a victory for free speech whilst most on the left fear the changes are corrupting democracy. Controversial campaign funding rule changes brought in after a Supreme Court ruling in 2010 have opened the floodgates to billionaire donors with the potential to buy influence all the way to the White House. The new system is rarely challenged in the mainstream media. But more fundamentally, in a free market society where the richest 400 people have more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans, Empire asks if money transforms or distorts the whole political process.
Chris Hedges on "US Elections Pick Your Poison" Activists warned to watch what they say as social media monitoring becomes 'next big thing in law enforcement' - Crime - UK. John Cooper QC said that police are monitoring key activists online and that officers and the courts are becoming increasingly savvy when it comes to social media. But, speaking to The Independent, he added that he also expected that to drive an increase in the number of criminals being brought to justice in the coming months. "People involved in public protest should use social media to their strengths, like getting their message across. But they should not use them for things like discussing tactics. They might as well be having a tactical meeting with their opponents sitting in and listening. "For example, if antifascist organisers were discussing their plans on social media, they can assume that a fascist organisation will be watching.
Social media sites are the last place you want to post something like that," he said. After a lengthy legal fight, Twitter eventually complied with an order to hand over the tweets on 14 September. Boxed In: The True Cost of Extreme Isolation in New York's Prisons. Www.IanPuddick.com - City Of London Police Waste Over £1,000,000 of Tax Payers Money On Ian puddick! www.IanPuddick.com » City Of London Police Waste Over £1,000,000 of Tax Payers Money On Ian puddick! Green Party candidate: Police handcuffed me to a chair for eight hours. By Arturo GarciaWednesday, October 17, 2012 12:47 EDT Green Party presidential candidate Dr.
Jill Stein said Wednesday police handcuffed her to a chair during her eight-hour imprisonment following her arrest outside the second presidential debate. “For most of the time it was just [running mate] Cheri Honkala and myself,” Stein told Democracy Now anchor Amy Goodman. “Yet they felt the need to keep us in tight plastic restraints tightly secured to metal chairs.” Stein and Honkala were arrested Tuesday while sitting in the street to protest their exclusion from this year’s presidential debates between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. During her arrest, Stein criticized the group that organized the event, the Commission on Presidential Debates, which was put together as a joint effort by Democrats and Republicans to administer the debates after the League of Women Voters stepped out of that role in 1987. Jill Stein Arrested Before Hofstra Debate, Campaign Reports. Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested outside of Hofstra University on Tuesday after she attempted to enter the debate grounds.
According to Stein's campaign press statement, Stein and running mate Cheri Honkala joined supporters outside the Hofstra campus at 2 p.m., where Stein declared: "We are here to bring the courage of those excluded from our politics to this mock debate, this mockery of democracy. " When they started to walk onto the debate grounds, they were stopped by police officers, and then the two women sat down on the ground. Student-run news organization Long Island Report posted a video of Stein and Honkala sitting, with an officer arguing, "You're blocking traffic. " After Honkala stated, "We want to practice our first amendment rights," the police can been seen removing the women from the ground and leading them away.
According to the campaign, Stein and Honkala were then arrested. As HuffPost blogger Carl Gibson wrote: Also on HuffPost: RAP NEWS 16: OBAMA v ROMNEY - the Final Presidential Debate: The lame rules for presidential debates: a pefect microcosm of US democracy | Glenn Greenwald. President Barack Obama walks past Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney during the first presidential debate. Photograph: AP The way the two major parties control the presidential debates is a perfect microcosm of how political debates are restricted in general.
Though typically shrouded in secrecy, several facts about this process have recently come to light and they are quite instructive. I was on Democracy Now this morning along with George Farah discussing the ways these debates, designed to cast the appearance of fostering vibrant exchanges, are actually intended to constrict the range of debated views as much as possible. My segment (and the transcript to it) can be seen here, but it was the commentary of Farah - who is a genuine expert in the history of presidential debates - that I found revealing. "We have a private corporation that was created by the Republican and Democratic parties called the Commission on Presidential Debates. All of this means, as Farah put it: Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala removed from Hofstra Debate. Jill Stein, Green Party candidate for President gets taken.
STATE BY STATE CORP TAKE OVER. Tim Carney: How corporate tax credits got in the 'cliff' deal. Some tax lobbyists mostly ignored the August bill "because they thought it would be just a political document," one K Streeter told me. "They were the ones that got bit in the butt. " Here's what happened: In late July, Finance Chairman Max Baucus announced the committee would soon convene to craft a bill extending many expiring tax credits. This attracted lobbyists like a raw steak attracts wolves. Former Sens.
John Breaux, D-La., and Trent Lott, R-Miss., a pair of rainmaker lobbyists, pleaded for extensions on behalf of a powerful lineup of clients. General Electric and Citigroup, for instance, hired Breaux and Lott to extend a tax provision that allows multinational corporations to defer U.S. taxes by moving profits into offshore financial subsidiaries. Liquor giant Diageo also retained Breaux and Lott to win extensions on two provisions benefitting rum-making in Puerto Rico. After packing 50 tax credit extensions into the bill, the committee voted 19 to 5 to pass it. Timothy P. Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf. It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall – so mystifying at the time – was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police.
The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves –was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?) , filed this request. Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it "police-statism": The Untouchables | FRONTLINE. January 22, 2013 FRONTLINE investigates why Wall Street’s leaders have escaped prosecution for any fraud related to the sale of bad mortgages. Is SEC “Fearful” of Wall Street? Agency Insider Says Yes April 8, 2014, 3:15 pm ET · by Jason M.
Breslow An SEC trial attorney used a recent retirement speech to criticize the agency for being too “tentative and fearful” in confronting Wall Street following the 2008 financial crisis. Watchdog Calls Out DOJ For Mortgage Fraud Response March 13, 2014, 6:33 pm ET · by Jason M. An inspector general’s report has called into question the Justice Department’s stated commitment to holding people accountable for misconduct that precipitated the financial crisis.
How JPMorgan’s $13 Billion Settlement Stacks Up November 19, 2013, 8:57 pm ET · by Jason M. Its the largest fine against an American company ever — and here’s how it compares to other recent bank settlements. Bank of America Liable for Mortgage “Hustle” Program October 24, 2013, 3:17 pm ET · by Jason M. The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions | Harry J Enten. Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense | Glenn Greenwald.