RSN: 5 Ways Life in America Would Be Better if Everyone Voted, Reported Northern Grey Wolf Sighting in Arizona Intrigues Environmentalists

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Andy Borowitz | Kochs Approve Plan to Fire Cash From Cannon at Voters

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "The billionaire Koch brothers have approved a controversial plan to shoot cash from cannons directly at voters heading into polling places on Election Day."
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UPDATE: Statement of Pierre Omidyar on Matt Taibbi's Departure | The Inside Story of Matt Taibbi's Departure From First Look Media
Pierre Omidyar, First Look
Omidyar writes: "I regret to announce that after several weeks of discussions, Matt Taibbi has left First Look."
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Holder: Ferguson Police Need 'Wholesale Change'
Eric Tucker, Associated Press
Tucker reports: "Attorney General Eric Holder said Wednesday that there was an obvious need for 'wholesale change' in the Ferguson, Missouri, police department."
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Only 1/2 of 1% of "Patriot" Act Secret Warrants Used Against Terrorism
Mark Jaycox, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jaycox reports: "Throughout the Patriot Act debate the Department of Justice urged Congress to pass Section 213 because it needed the sneak and peak power to help investigate and prosecute terrorism crimes 'without tipping off terrorists.'"
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Red Cross "Diverted Funds" During Sandy Aftermath to Bolster Image
Southern California Public Radio
Excerpt: "Within hours of Superstorm Sandy slamming the East Coast two years ago, Americans opened their wallets to help - donating millions to the first charity that came to mind: the American Red Cross."
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5 Ways Life in America Would Be Better if Everyone Voted
Sean McElwee, Rolling Stone
McElwee reports: "With Election Day approaching on November 4th, Americans are faced with a perennial question: to vote or not to vote? In the last midterm election, in 2010, only 47 percent of the eligible population voted."
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Reported Northern Grey Wolf Sighting in Arizona Intrigues Environmentalists
Felicia Fonseca, Associated Press
Fonseca reports: "An animal resembling a gray wolf has been spotted roaming the far reaches of northern Arizona, officials said Thursday, and tests are planned to determine exactly what it is."
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Daily Kos: Daily Beast: The $1 billion right-wing conspiracy you haven’t heard of

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Cheney outraged that Obama mentioned Ferguson in speech Video of police murder of John Crawford shows 911 caller lied ‘Little Jewish radical’ responds to Pat Robertson: Religious freedom & feigned valor in the military Sign this: Rare opportunity to reverse draconian drug laws Female fighter pilot? To Fox host, that’s just ‘boobs on the ground’ Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts signed document declaring Virginia home as his ‘principal residence’ Quick signature needed: Game-changing regulations to stop coal pollution Daily Beast: The $1 billion right-wing conspiracy you haven’t heard of Remarkable personal story: Did the Standard Hotel assume this woman was a prostitute because she’s black? Virginia Republican wants you to forget that whole forced ultrasound thing Report: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to resign Missouri police wearing ‘I am Darren Wilson’ bracelets Sign the petition: Time to beat the Kochs at their own game. Fight back against Americans for Prosperity funded ads attacking Democrats Joni Ernst, cynical tea party conspiracy theorist Lesson of Hobby Lobby: No accommodation on birth control is acceptable to religious right Voter discontent with Cuomo brews as he abandons his promise to help Democrats win the state Senate Barbara Comstock demands we track immigrants like FedEx tracks packages Number of Latinos with health insurance surges with Obamacare Boehner endorsed debate over air strikes in Iraq and Syria. In 2015. Maybe. Log in or sign up for Daily Kos, the nation's largest progressive community. Sign up to receive the Daily Kos Recommended email by clicking here. Thanks for all you do, The Daily Kos team

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RSN: Wisconsin Will Enact Voter ID Law Denounced as 'Recipe for Chaos'

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Andy Borowitz | Republicans Air Early Attack Ad on Newborn Clinton

Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "A Republican Super PAC defended the broadcast, on Saturday morning, of an attack ad highly critical of Hillary Clinton's newborn granddaughter, Charlotte, who was born on Friday."
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Wisconsin Will Enact Voter ID Law Denounced as 'Recipe for Chaos'
Zoe Sullivan, Guardian UK
Sullivan writes: "A controversial voter ID law in Wisconsin, which critics fear will disenfranchise thousands of voters in the November midterm elections, must be implemented after a federal appeals court turned down a request to re-hear a legal challenge."
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Holder Departure Clouds Fate of Civil Rights Cases
Jesse J. Holland, Yahoo! News
Holland writes: "Moments after making fresh demands that Attorney General Eric Holder open federal investigations into police shootings of unarmed black men, a cluster of civil rights activists learned, courtesy of whispers and a shared e-tablet, that the nation's first black attorney general was stepping down."
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Police Clash With Occupy Hong Kong Pro Democracy Demonstrators
James Pomfret and Yimou Lee, Reuters
Excerpt: "Violent clashes between Hong Kong riot police and students galvanized tens of thousands of supporters for the city's pro-democracy movement and kick-started a plan to lock down the heart of the Asian financial center early on Sunday."
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ESPN Journalists Ignore the Biggest Sports Story of the Last 24 Hours
Joaquim Moreira Salles, ThinkProgress
Salles writes: "Mum's the word for ESPN employees when it comes to discussing Bill Simmon's three week suspension. According to TMZ, ESPN's on air talent were told explicitly not to discuss the issue: 'On a corporate level, they told us not to talk about it,' a source at ESPN told TMZ."
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A Battle to Keep Trees, Or an Industry, Standing
Michael Wines, The New York Times
Wines writes: "Conservationists, crying betrayal, are in court again, trying to force a reappraisal of the auctions in the world's largest temperate rain forest."
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'His Life Is Our Life': Tribal Elders Want Buffalo Back in the Ecosystem
Nate Schweber, Al Jazeera America
Schweber writes: "But buffalo are not just a figment of the imagination. Inside a large white teepee rising from a grassy hill nearby Ervin Carlson, president of the InterTribal Buffalo Council, told a crowd gathered for a treaty ceremony that bringing buffalo herds back to North America was a vital task for Native Americans."
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RSN: Radiation Release From Federal Facility Still Stymies Experts, A Pivot on the Peace Island, et al

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William Boardman | Radiation Release From Federal Facility Still Stymies Experts

William Boardman, Reader Supported News
Boardman writes: "Plutonium and other radioactive elements were accidentally released from the only U.S. underground nuclear weapons waste storage site in New Mexico on Valentine's Day 2014. More than three months later, investigators think they've found an underground container that failed - and that there are hundreds more like them, both underground and above ground, at different sites in New Mexico and Texas."
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Ralph Nader | Big Credit Suisse's Sweetheart Deal
Ralph Nader, The Nader Page
Nader writes: "Attorney General Eric Holder's sweetheart settlement with Switzerland's second largest bank, corporate criminal Credit Suisse, sent the wrong message to other corporate barons."
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Judge Allows Guantanamo Force Feeding to Continue, but Offers Rebuke
Charlie Savage, The New York Times
Savage writes: "The decision underscored the stubborn problems entangling Guantanamo - a dispute over its future between Mr. Obama, who still wants to close it, and many Republicans in Congress, who want its use expanded, has resulted in a frozen-in-place policy that no one supports."
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Kathy Kelly | A Pivot on the Peace Island
Kathy Kelly, Common Dreams
Kelly writes: "Since 2007, activists have risked arrests, imprisonment, heavy fines and wildly excessive use of police force to resist the desecration caused as mega-corporations like Samsung and Daelim build a base to accommodate U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines for their missions throughout Asia."
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McDonald's CEO Says the Company Pays 'Fair' Wages
Will Freeman, ThinkProgress
"'We continue to believe that we pay fair and competitive wages,' stated Don Thompson, McDonald's CEO, in an annual meeting with shareholders at corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois on Thursday."
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Seven Dead Including Gunman in 'Mass Murder' California Shooting
Martin Pengelly and Martin Williams, Guardian UK
Excerpt: "Seven people have been killed in a shooting near a college campus in California, in what authorities described as 'premeditated mass murder.' Seven more people were injured, one with injuries that police said were life-threatening and required surgery."
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Kumi Naidoo | Agriculture at a Crossroads: How Food Systems Affect Biodiversity
Kumi Naidoo, EcoWatch
Naidoo writes: "The food system we choose has a direct impact on which type of world we will have. It's the difference between a field that hums and is robust with life, or one which is dusty, dry and dead."
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....a smirking slap on the wrist.....

Truthout

"When the law is diminished to a smirking slap on the wrist for those individuals and financial organizations who caused such hardship to the vast majority of Americans, it becomes tarred and feathered beyond credibility. "

Friday, 23 August 2013 13:18

The DOJ Has Corrupted the Rule of Law by Not Prosecuting Wall Street Financial Looters

 

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
Journalist and scholarly muse Thomas Frank noted in a recent e-mail to colleagues,

September 15 will mark five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the official beginning of the slump that never ends. It was a moment that smashed the faith of millions of people. And so it’s time for a look back: What did the nation learn from that moment of complete disillusionment?

Well, basically nothing. We came to the turning point and didn’t turn.

Frank was referring to his September dateline Harper's Magazine article (only available in the print edition and behind an online paywall), in which he concluded:

But a society that believes good government to be an impossibility is unlikely to do what is necessary to keep industry honest. Instead, its regulators will come to see the regulated, rather than the public, as their main clients. They will imagine that industry can police itself. They will party with their private-sector pals and spin happily through the revolving door. And the rest of us will resign ourselves to scandal after scandal, as a new generation of looters rises up to claim positions at the trough when the old looters retire. Indeed—to repurpose an immortal statement by a certain Bush Administration economist—given what we now think we know about the system, it would be irrational for them not to loot....

There is one way, however, in which the changes brought about by 2008 have been permanent—one way in which the center will probably never hold again. We are a society that watched as those who obeyed the rules got played by Wall Street and Washington. And it has not only hardened us, made us more blasé about corruption; it has corrupted us. We be held our powerlessness at the hands of the mighty, and we decided that the thing to do was to make Wall Street even stronger. We accepted our powerlessness and then magnified it. Today we all know that another bubble will soon inflate and burst, but we have chosen to live with that— five years from the last, five years to the next! Just grab your cash and hang on.

 

Frank reflects upon what Elizabeth Warren was, in essence, admonishing Attorney General Holder in a letter to him discussed in yesterday's BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary, "Elizabeth Warren Reads Riot Act to Holder for Not Prosecuting Big Bank Mortgage Fraud."

When you adopt as a tacit policy that those in large financial institutions will not be prosecuted for crimes (or individuals personally fined) against the economic well being of the nation, as well as the fleecing of countless homeowners, you devalue respect for the law. In doing so, Holder and Obama have severely harmed probably the most basic glue of a diverse American society by creating a fundamental skepticism that the law will be fairly applied and cannot be bought.

The American legal system is by no means perfect. Minorities are disproportionately discriminated against in policing and prosecution, and the rich can pay for attorneys that can find a loophole in a knotted thread. But the basic institution of our legal system being -- in overall concept -- one that ultimately bends toward fairness has been tarnished to the point of potentially creating a societal disrespect for the rule of law, when the law exempts those who do greatest harm to society (even if in a "non-violent" way).

The reality is that the Obama Administration has turned the law upside down, punishing those who were conned by fraud -- while, on the other hand, rewarding (with taxpayer subsidies, favorable tax rates, government contracts, appointment to positions of power and immunity from prosecution among other perquisites) those who have intentionally committed fraud in a variety of ways (some of which were noted in yesteday's BuzzFlash at Truthout commentary and in a large number of previous BF at TO columns.)

The lack of governmental legal and regulatory enforcement of the looters at the top of the American financial pyramid that both Frank and Warren are deeply disturbed about is like keeping two sets of books: one set of laws for the financial and ruling elite and another set for the other 99%.

This cynically undermines the US legal system. It makes being a victim of fraud a crime (subject to foreclosure, bankruptcy, etc.), while -- on the other hand -- making the actual criminal (the one who illegally profits) into a holder of a get out of jail free card, along with a bag of trillions of dollars in goodies courtesy of the very people being fleeced.

Thomas Frank is not optimistic:

Ignoring public cynicism is the easy way forward. You don’t have to vilify or punish anyone, you don’t have to investigate or explain anything. But ignoring it will have terrible consequences, and not just because the Democrats have traditionally been the party of government and will suffer all the more if our epidemic federalphobia is not addressed. The bigger problem is this: the economy has to have rules, and government is how we make those rules. If vigilant financial regulation is missing or suppressed or underfunded, disasters like the crash of 2008 are unavoidable.

 

When the law is diminished to a smirking slap on the wrist for those individuals and financial organizations who caused such hardship to the vast majority of Americans, it becomes tarred and feathered beyond credibility. Once respect for the law is dissolved, there is no super glue yet invented that can maintain it as a stabilizing force in our society.
(Photo: Wikipedia)

http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/18158-the-doj-has-corrupted-the-rule-of-law-by-not-prosecuting-wall-street-financial-looters

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But the Obama administration has been virtually unrepentant ever since news broke that the Justice Department seized the phone records of Associated Press journalists for two months.

Attorney General Eric Holder defended this chilling move against the press. A White House spokesperson tried to finesse the issue. And the president himself has not stepped forward to acknowledge that a serious intrusion on press freedom has occurred.¹

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Footnote:
1. Alfredo Lopez: AP Seizures and the Frightening Web They've Uncovered
2. Alternet: Six Brave Whistleblowers Charged Under the Espionage Act

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