WARS
ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
An Oligarchy Has
Broken Our Democracy
Each new
election year promises change. We will choose a new president and new
representatives in Congress; fresh faces will make their appearances in
Washington DC, while old ones disappear. But what about the people who stay in
power, one election after another, less exposed to the public eye? The concept
of a ‘Deep State’ has been around for a while, but rarely to describe the United
States. The term, used in Kemalist Turkey by the political class, referred to an
informal grouping of oligarchs, senior military and intelligence operatives and
organized crime, who ran the state along anti-democratic lines regardless of who
was formally in power… These operatives use their proximity to power and ability
to offer high-paying jobs to government officials to achieve outcomes foreclosed
to ordinary citizens. As professor Martin Gilens of Princeton, who studied the
correlation between American popular opinion polls and public policy outcomes,
concluded: “[T]he preferences of economic elites have far more
independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens
do ... ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government
does in the United States.” More
OXFAM: 62 people own
same as half world
Runaway
inequality has created a world where 62 people own as much as the poorest half
of the world's population, according to an Oxfam report published today ahead of the annual gathering of
the world's financial and political elites in Davos. This number has fallen
dramatically from 388 as recently as 2010 and 80 last year. An Economy for the
1%, shows that the wealth of the poorest half of the world's population - that's
3.6 billion people - has fallen by a trillion dollars since 2010. This 41 per
cent drop has occurred despite the global population increasing by around 400
million people during that period. Meanwhile the wealth of the richest 62 has
increased by more than half a trillion dollars to $1.76tr. Just nine of the '62'
are women… Globally, it is estimated that super-rich individuals have stashed a
total of $7.6tr in offshore accounts. If tax were paid on the income that this
wealth generates, an extra $190bil would be available to governments every
year. More
Bernie Sanders Gets
Group Endorsements When Members Decide; Clinton When Leaders
Decide
In the war for
endorsements in the Democratic presidential primary, there is a clear trend.
Every major union or progressive organization that let its members have a vote
endorsed Bernie Sanders. Meanwhile, all of Hillary Clinton’s major group
endorsements come from organizations where the leaders decide. And several of
those endorsements were accompanied by criticisms from members about the lack of
a democratic process. It’s perhaps the clearest example yet of Clinton’s
powerful appeal to the Democratic Party’s elite, even as support for Sanders
explodes among the rank and file… The one major labor union that did allow for a
vote was the Communications Workers of America. CWA followed a three-month
process that included meetings with members, telephone town halls, and an online
polling voting process. “We conducted an online membership poll from
mid-September to early December,” said CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson in a
statement to The Intercept. “Tens of thousands of members voted in the poll,
with Sanders getting a decisive majority.” More
Mass. Dem Primary
Pits Underdog Sanders Against Establishment Favorite Clinton
Massachusetts,
we are told by the purveyors of conventional wisdom, is solid Clinton Country.
We're talking big-time Hillary to the bone. That convention, and the built-in
advantage that comes with it, makes it an uphill battle for Vermont Sen. Bernie
Sanders, Clinton's chief opponent, to mount any kind of challenge ahead of the
state's March 1 Democratic presidential primary. Thousands of Sanders's
supporters have felt "the Bern" and rallied in Massachusetts over the course of
the campaign, but that hasn't translated into institutional support for the
socialist Democratic Vermonter. More
On the other hand. .
.
Senate Democrats
Block Republican Anti-Refugee Bill
Senate
Democratic Leader Harry Reid successfully linked the controversial legislation
to GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s highly-criticized proposal to ban
all Muslims from the United States. The House overwhelmingly passed the refugee
bill last year, but the Senate version stopped short of garnering the 60 votes
necessary to advance for final approval. “Over and over again, Republicans
remain committed to pledging loyalty to the divisive platform they have built
for Donald Trump,” Reid said. “We’ll not allow Republicans to hijack the Senate
floor to play politics with our national security.” Republicans in turn accused
Democrats of endangering national security, and warned that measures needed to
be taken to prevent the Islamic State from posing as Syrian refugees and
entering the United States. More
Snyder has faced
increasingly intense criticism and calls for his resignation as the lead crisis
in Flint continues. Yesterday, President Obama approved $80 million in water aid and
infrastructure to the city of Flint after researchers and the Michigan
Department of Health and Human Services found elevated blood levels of lead
among people who drank or bathed in city tap water. The lead exposures came at
the tail end of a number of drinking water issues following Flint’s temporary
switch to the Flint River as a water source. The decisions that led to the
switch—along with the campaign to minimize test results and the subsequent lack
of regard for citizen complaints about the water—have led to calls that the
Flint crisis is an end result of environmental racism. Flint is predominantly
black, and according to the 2010 Census, almost two-thirds of its citizens are
nonwhite. More
* *
* *
Free Speech for
French Magazine CHARLIE HEBDO can also be Vile Speech. . .
(Refers to incidents in Cologne,
Germany on New Year’s Eve when women were molested by groups of men which
included migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East)
CHARLIE HEBDO:
“What would have
happened If little Aylan had grown up? Ass groper in Germany”
|
Drowned toddler
Aylan Kurdi on the coast of Turkey
|
Our Response Must Be
Against Sexual Violence, Not Race, Say Feminists
The women's rights activists
wrote: "It is harmful for all of us if feminism is exploited by extremists
to incite against certain ethnicities, as is currently being done in the
discussion surrounding the incidents in Cologne. "It is wrong to highlight
sexualised violence only when the perpetrators are allegedly the perceived
‘others’: Muslim, Arab, black or North-African men, i.e., those who are regarded
as ‘non-Germans’ by extremists… "Combatting sexualised violence must be the
political priority every single day, because it is omnipresent… "One in three
women over the age of 15 have experienced physical and/or sexualised violence.
Statistics by the German
Federal Police count more than 7,300 reported rapes and sexual assaults in
Germany every year, amounting to more than 20 every day. Not to mention the many
more that are never reported," it said. More
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