CIA medical staff gave strikingly detailed instructions about how to torture terror suspects, declassified documents reveal. Some right-wingers will say, see? They provided boundaries to pain and degradation! They were civilized about their torture!, but they'll forget that torture is useless. And the best I can say about the behavior described in these documents is that they might inspire a thousand dystopian novels.
Lost in reporting of the Democratic filibuster over gun control in the Senate last week is that Democrats would use terrorist watchlists to deny certain folks guns. I feel compelled to note that folks on a terrorist watch list have not been convicted of a crime -- or even accused of a crime, really, since showing up on a list doesn't indicate an indictment or even an arrest -- and that you or I could wind up on a terrorist watchlist without any "concrete facts" or "irrefutable evidence" connecting us to actual terrorism (versus the kind of activities that "terrorize" corporatists and their lackeys in Congress). That's before we get to how hard it is to get off a list, or how easy it is for folks on the watchlist to get harassed for other reasons. (And they say the intelligence agencies don't share information!) And, as Paul Craig Roberts used to say, with 1.1 million folks enmeshed in the watchlist system, you'd think we'd be having a lot more terrorist attacks.
From Jonas Schmidt Hansen at Occupy.com, we learn that Goldman Sachs bought 19% of Denmark's public energy corporation two years ago for rather less than the corporation's value, and just made a nearly $2 billion windfall on that investment. You'll really hate this story -- though Denmark has a strong economy, and hundreds of thousands of its good citizens protested the privatization of Dong Energy, Denmark's old minister of finance sold it anyway, and even gave Goldman Sachs veto power over board decisions (why, that's an even better deal than Republicans had when they had only 41 out of 100 Senators!). Plus, Dong (and Goldman Sachs) will get bailed out by the Danish taxpayer if/when it goes down. The word we have for all of this is corruption -- and this, in one of the least corrupt nations on Earth.
How would Microsoft turn its proposed purchase of LinkedIn into yet another undeserved corporate welfare tax break? By taking out a $28 billion loan to buy LinkedIn while also using over $100 billion in offshore holdings as collateral, that's how. Which means they'll get to deduct the interest on the loan they don't need from their taxes, and the rest of us (i.e., working families and small businesses) will have to pay more for the services we all use. Naturally, Microsoft's offshore holdings somehow account for more than half the corporation's profits, though they only employ about one out of every 50 Microsoft employees. Nice work if you can get it!
Yet another "liberal" media report talks about net neutrality as if it were only about the "harm" it would cause to corporations. And this report came from NPR! The sad part is that the same blogger who talked on the radio about "stifling innovation" and "reduced investment" -- as if big telecoms don't spend all their energies fighting innovation! As if we should be held hostage to corporate threats of "reduced investment" that they absolutely will not carry out! -- wrote a much better report on the matter for an NPR blog, which of course won't get as much play as whatever NPR puts on the radio. Why, it's almost like that's the idea.
Finally, Sheila Bapat at Yes! magazine writes about how "domestic workers have been building a powerful, inclusive movement -- the domestic workers’ movement -- through organizing outside of traditional unions." The non-profit "workers' centers" at this heart of this movement bypass traditional organizing tactics and go straight to activism for better wages and better treatment. I think unions are necessary, though building one is more a long-term strategy than a short-term one, but given how badly these workers get treated, and (especially!) given how little attention unions pay to domestic workers, I can certainly understand their impatience. And I'm certainly not going to argue with their results -- building a union ain't no good anyway unless you keep agitating for a better life, which latter itemm these good folks are getting plenty of practice in doing.
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