Ralph Nader and Julian Assange on Wikimania

Ralph Nader has commented about the government witchhunt of Wikileaks:

Secrecy-keeping the people and Congress in the dark-is the cancer eating at the vitals of democracy. What is remarkable about all the official hullabaloo by government officials, who leak plenty themselves, is that there never is any indictment or prosecution of government big wigs who continually suppress facts and knowledge in order to carry out very devastating actions like invading Iraq under false pretenses and covering up corporate contractors abuses. The morbid and corporate-indentured secrecy of government over the years has cost many American lives, sent Americans to illegal wars, bilked consumers of billions of dollars and harmed the safety and economic well-being of workers.

Meanwhile, Julian Assange warned those who work for traditional media outlets that they should not try to dissociate the work of Wikileaks from the work that they do. In fact, he argues that once the U.S. government criminally prosecutes him, that they will be next, and that will be the end of serious government journalism. This link includes a long interview with Assange by Cenk Uygur of MSNBC. Here's what he had to say about the various calls for him to be illegally murdered, coming from several prominent American politicians:

If we are to have a civil society, you cannot have senior people making calls on national TV to go around the judiciary and illegally murder people," he said. "That is incitement to commit murder.

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What passes for education

Chris Hedges discussed education with Amy Goodman at Democracy Now, and it is not thriving in America:

The corporatization of universities is far advanced now. You have a withering of the humanities, destruction of philosophy departments. Departments must raise not only their own research and grant money, but often their own salaries. Well, you know, who’s going to pay for that? And so, what we’ve turned our universities into are essentially vocational schools. If you go to a school like Princeton, then you will become a systems manager and go to Goldman Sachs. If you go to an inner-city dysfunctional public school in a place like Camden, you are trained vocationally to stock shelves in Walmart. It’s a kind of solidification of a very pernicious class system, and one that doesn’t train students anymore to think but to fill slots.
Hedges also had harsh words for Barack Obama: [More. . . .]

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Obama Signs Tax Package: What’s in it for me?

President Obama signed the 2010 tax package into law Friday, December 17, 2010. This is the Act that's been so much in the news lately. Check out the TaxProf Blog's compilation of both technical and opinion resources for answers to questions like: "What's in the Act?" and "How will this Act affect me personally?" If there's an acronym for the Act's title yet, then I don't know what it is. Here's the official title:

“TAX RELIEF, UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE REAUTHORIZATION, AND JOB CREATION ACT OF 2010”

It looks like a hard title to 'acronym-ize' into something memorable like COBRA, for example. COBRA (The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985), like the 2010 Act, changed parts of the Internal Revenue Code. COBRA denied employers tax deductions for health insurance premiums if the employer’s plan failed to provide for continuing coverage for separated employees. While I’ve heard many people speak of ‘COBRA coverage’ over the years, I’ll bet few of them knew their right to COBRA medical insurance came as a result of a change in the tax code. Check out the TaxProf Blog to find out what new, COBRA-like changes may be buried in the 2010 "TRUIRJCA". No! That will never do as an acronym for the

“TAX RELIEF, UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE REAUTHORIZATION, AND JOB CREATION ACT OF 2010”

Continue ReadingObama Signs Tax Package: What’s in it for me?

Statement by Julian Assange upon his bail

Julian Assange of Wikileaks, who is involved in a Kafkaesque ordeal, made the following statement on December 16, 2010: It's rather amazing how this interviewer doesn't want to understand the situation. Maybe she would get it if she had been accused of a terrible crime by the corporate news media, and her name had been smeared across the Internet despite the fact that the prosecutor never actually brought any charges or produced evidence of any crime. Maybe then she would get it. The interviewer also can't seem to wrap her head around the fact that Assange is likely being smeared by those countries and corporations that are being embarrassed by his devastating leaks of authentic documents. This is nothing short of Kafkaesque.

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Matt Taibbi on Bernie Sanders

For the past few years, I've looked to Matt Taibbi for powerful ways to express, simultaneously emotionally and intellectually, the current national mess we're in. He recently wrote of his admiration for Bernie Sanders at Rolling Stone:

While everyone else in Washington was debating the political efficacy of the deal . . . Sanders blew all of that off and just looked at the deal’s moral implications. Which are these: this tax deal, frankly and unequivocally, is the result of a relatively small group of already-filthy rich people successfully lobbying an even smaller group of morally spineless politicians to shift an ever-bigger share of society’s burdens to the lower and (what’s left of the) middle classes. This is people who already have lots of shit just demanding more shit, for the sheer rotten sake of it. . . I contrast this now to the behavior of Barack Obama. I can’t even count how many times I listened to Barack Obama on the campaign trail talk about how, as president, he would rescind the Bush tax cuts as soon as he had the chance. He stood up and he said over and over again – I can still hear him saying “Let me be clear!” with that Great Statesman voice of his, before he went into this routine – that the Bush tax cuts were wrong and immoral. He said more than once that they “offended his conscience." Then, just as he did with drug re-importation and Guantanamo and bulk Medicare negotiations for pharmaceuticals and the issue of whether or not he would bring registered lobbyists into his White House and a host of other promises, he tossed his campaign “convictions” in the toilet and changed his mind once he was more accountable to lobbyists than primary voters.

Continue ReadingMatt Taibbi on Bernie Sanders