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.
Democracy:Upgrade by Jodi Rose on Prezi. ‘Waarom zou ik u inzicht geven in mijn agenda?’ 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 . 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. Cameron family fortune made in tax havens. 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. 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.
Lawrence Lessig explains how money corrupts Congress. 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. 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.
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. Mr Cooper QC's warning comes after a New York court ordered Twitter to hand over messages posted on the site by a demonstrator belonging to the Occupy Wall Street movement in America.
Mr Cooper QC added: "activists are putting themselves at more risk. 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.
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. " RAP NEWS 16: OBAMA v ROMNEY - the Final Presidential Debate: The lame rules for presidential debates: a pefect microcosm of US democracy.
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. 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. Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy. 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. 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. The Untouchables: How the Obama administration protected Wall Street from prosecutions. (updated below - Update II) PBS' Frontline program on Tuesday night broadcast a new one-hour report on one of the greatest and most shameful failings of the Obama administration: the lack of even a single arrest or prosecution of any senior Wall Street banker for the systemic fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis: a crisis from which millions of people around the world are still suffering.
What this program particularly demonstrated was that the Obama justice department, in particular the Chief of its Criminal Division, Lanny Breuer, never even tried to hold the high-level criminals accountable. Pentagon's new massive expansion of 'cyber-security' unit is about everything except defense.