Agencies & Systems
U.S. government agencies and systems
What is the counterbalance to the palpably destructive form of modern day schooling? Alternative education models being tested in classrooms around the world.
New York Times reporter James Risen, who has been ordered to testify at the trial of a former CIA officer accused of disclosing classified information, lost his bid to get the Supreme Court to clarify whether journalists have a right to protect their confidential sources.
Osama bin Laden’s personal guard, Nabil Na’eem Abul Fattah, tells Lebanon’s Asian Society Information Agency that not only is the leader of Al-Qaeda, his former colleague Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a US double agent working on behalf of the interests of Washington, but that the leader of Jabhat Al-Nusra is a US agent fighting inside Syria.
A ridiculous perversion of the concept of ownership and property rights has infected most of the world like a virus: property taxes.
The U.S. Supreme Court decision to refuse to hear our case concerning Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which permits the military to seize U.S. citizens and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers without due process, means that this provision will continue to be law. It means the nation has entered a post-constitutional era. It means that extraordinary rendition of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by our government is legal. It means that the courts, like the legislative and executive branches of government, exclusively serve corporate power — one of the core definitions of fascism. It means that the internal mechanisms of state are so corrupted and subservient to corporate power that there is no hope of reform or protection for citizens under our most basic constitutional rights. It means that the consent of the governed — a poll by OpenCongress.com showed that this provision had a 98 percent disapproval rating — is a cruel joke.
The state, after the coordinated nationwide eradication of Occupy encampments, has relentlessly used the courts to harass and neutralize Occupy activists, often handing out long probation terms that come with activists’ forced acceptance of felony charges. A felony charge makes it harder to find employment. Most important, the long probation terms effectively prohibit further activism.
Foster Gamble: From one perspective, people are trying to use the government and the court system to stand up for their rights. Ideally, from my perspective, none of this begging for rights from authoritarian rulers or frequently co-opted courts should be necessary because no person or organization should have rights that all people don’t have. I believe that any individual or corporation that is violating any person, their privacy, or their property should be prosecuted and need to provide restitution. These legislative wins that I refer to are examples of that Stage, of bringing as much integrity to our existing institutions as we can while we’re transforming our society to a free one. As we learn to move into self-ownership and self-governance, where there are defensive rules to protect against aggression and fraud, hopefully we’re going to look back at the obvious evidence showing government to be the most lethal concept in human history with over 200 million deaths just within our governments’ own so-called jurisdiction in the 20th century alone. People who want others to rule them can set up their own special colonies for self-selected coercion, but the rest of us, following the principle of the non-initiation of force, will be free to love, to prosper, and to thrive.
In this interview with former Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi, he compares the non-enforcement of socially destructive white-collar crime with the highly aggressive law enforcement tactics applied to virtually everyone else in America.
A US federal judge dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration’s killing of three Americans in drone strokes, a decision slammed as “a true travesty of justice for our constitutional democracy.”
If wealth and income weren’t already so concentrated in the hands of a few, the shameful “McCutcheon” decision by the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court wouldn’t be as dangerous. But by taking “Citizen’s United” one step further and effectively eviscerating campaign finance laws, the Court has issued an invitation to oligarchy.
The Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision Wednesday in McCutcheon v. FEC overturned a law that allowed the federal government to cap how much an individual could give to multiple federal candidates and committees in a single campaign cycle. The $123,200 overall limit for total contributions to campaigns, parties, and PACs will no longer be in effect, although contributions to individual candidates remain limited to $2,600. Potentially opening the door to a flood of cash from wealthy individuals, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the dissenting opinion, stating that this ruling “perhaps devastates, what remains of campaign finance reform.” Sen. Bernie Sanders discusses the Supreme Court’s ruling with MSNBC’s Ronan Farrow. In the 2nd video (see below), RT’s Lindsay France looks into this historic ruling.
The CIA has been misleading Congress and the public about its interrogation practices for years, according to The Washington Post. Post reporters spoke with officials who have seen a still classified report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, detailing the growth of secret “black sites,” misstatements on the effectiveness of harsh interrogation techniques, and how the CIA has misled Congress about how they gain intelligence from detainees. The controversial report is expected to come before the full Senate on Thursday for a vote on whether to declassify the document. RT’s Ameera David speaks with national security journalist Marcy Wheeler about these new revelations.
Bernie Sanders: The disastrous 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United threw out campaign funding laws that limited what wealthy individuals and corporations could spend on elections. Since that ruling, campaign spending by Adelson, the Koch brothers and a handful of other billionaire families has fundamentally undermined American democracy. If present trends continue, elections will not be decided by one-person, one-vote, but by a small number of very wealthy families who spend huge amounts of money supporting right-wing candidates who protect their interests. This process – a handful of the wealthiest people in our country controlling the political process – is called “oligarchy.” The great political struggle we now face is whether the United States retains its democratic heritage or whether we move toward an oligarchic form of society where the real political power rests with a handful of billionaires, not ordinary Americans.
You’ve heard that there’s a big battle between the CIA and Congress over the CIA spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee’s review of documents related to the Bush-era torture program. Many are calling it a “constitutional crisis“. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa calls it potential “treason“. The congress members complaining about spying by the CIA are right, of course.
It was a truly historic moment Tuesday when Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to warn that the CIA’s continuing cover-up of its torture program is threatening our constitutional division of power. By blatantly concealing what Feinstein condemned as “the horrible details of a CIA program that never, never, never should have existed,” the spy agency now acts as a power unto itself, and the agency’s outrages have finally aroused the senator’s umbrage.
