Policies
In an exceedingly rare moment, the Senate voted unanimously for the bipartisan “Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.” The legislation now moves to the U.S. House of Representatives, which has its own version of the bill.
In a letter to President Obama, Captain Christopher John Antal stated he can no longer serve as a chaplain for an “empire.”
A tip from a CIA spy to authorities in apartheid-era South Africa led to Nelson Mandela’s arrest, beginning the leader’s 27 years behind bars, a report said on Sunday.
Donald Rickard, a former US vice-consul in Durban and CIA operative, told British film director John Irvin that he had been involved in Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which was seen as necessary because the Americans believed he was “completely under the control of the Soviet Union”, according to a report in the Sunday Times newspaper. “He could have incited a war in South Africa, the United States would have to get involved, grudgingly, and things could have gone to hell,” Rickard said. “We were teetering on the brink here and it had to be stopped, which meant Mandela had to be stopped. And I put a stop to it.”
Obama has concerns over algorithmic artificial intelligence operating without human oversight. The report, “Big Data: A Report on Algorithmic Systems, Opportunity, and Civil Rights,” catalogs the growing sphere of influence represented by Big Data in society, including employment, higher education, and criminal justice. The principle behind the recent Big Data paper is protecting citizens from out of control technology.
Additionally, some agencies are not being factually accurate in what they are telling the public regarding surveillance data being collected.
According to Politico, of the $60 million raised by and for the Hillary Victory Fund, a PAC jointly controlled by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC, less than 1% of the money raised ended up benefiting state Democratic parties. Why does this matter? Because Clinton has been touting from day one, it seems, that she’s been raising money for the party as well as for herself, and the media, even after stories like this, by actor and activist Margot Kidder, started coming out, has been taking her at her word, allowing the assertion to go unchallenged, even when the facts were at hand. I’ve been calling the Hillary Victory fund a “kickback scheme.” Others have called it money-laundering. Full explanation of how the transfers work is here.
248 pages of classified papers on the TTIP were released by Greenpeace Netherlands on Monday. The US is pressuring the EU over the deal, a report on the texts alleges.
The Supreme Court must by the Constitution hear every case presented to it. It does not. It hears only 1% of those presented annually, justifying this by the unconstitutional Judiciary Act of 1925 under President William Howard Taft. The Su[preme Court is the third branch of government along with Congress and The Executive. It guarantees citizens equality under Law. As it stands now there is NO equal protection under law.
The foreign interactions between the USA (under the Obama administration) and the Saudis has resulted in the creation of Isis, the maltreatment of Iran, the war in Syria, and of course 9-11. Read the total entanglement of the United States in creating the problems in the middle East and the endless wars.
“Everyone, this is scary stuff—no matter your candidate, we need to protect our right to vote for whomever we choose,” wrote one New York voter who discovered that she had been unregistered as a Democrat without her knowledge last month.
Here’s the latest on the medical marijuana legislation in the U.K.
Do you think a free citizen should have the right to grow food on their own private property? A city board in Missouri doesn’t think so. In fact one family has been given a mere four days to destroy their beloved food source simply because it is in their front yard. Nathan Athans loves his garden. “I spend all my free time out here,” he says. Besides the therapeutic and health benefits of getting your hands in the soil, and the financial savings of having fresh nutritious food readily available, Nathan also enjoys the peace of mind. “I want my family to know where their food is coming from, I don’t want to have to go to the grocery store and worry about what was done to that food,” he says.
Sanders’ unequivocal ban on fracking, coupled with a just transition to clean and renewable energy, is what this country needs.
Finally, somebody says “no” to big pharma’s tax dodging… but will it hold up?
“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
