Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway stated today that Trump will not release his tax returns. Send them to: wikileaks.org/#submit so we can.
Showing posts with label Wikileaks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wikileaks. Show all posts
Monday, January 23, 2017
Lie Down With Dogs, You Get Fleas
The glorious honeymoon between Trump and WikiLeaks is likely over now (according to a McClatchy reporter):
Monday, February 14, 2011
U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Dark Overlords of the Universe
The U.S. Chamber has been at war with all elected Democrats. That's just a fact. They clearly hate any progressive idea. They certainly hated health-insurance reform. And recent leaks of some 40,000 e-mails from the "security" and dirty tricks firm HBGary Federal proves that the Chamber had hired them (and others) as "operatives" to smear their critics.The affiliated North Carolina Chamber of Commerce recently hosted GOP leaders in the NC General Assembly, who are busily carrying water for the powerful business interests that want environmental regulations rolled back, like a cheap rug at a dance house-party.
Meanwhile, President Obama baked the U.S. Chamber a bread pudding (or something) and walked up the street to curry their favor.
With Citizens United the Supreme Court unleashed this would-be tyrant, which means to own our government at every level.
We noted last fall, when the Boone Chamber held its candidate forum in the County Courthouse, that the executive director denied any affiliation with the U.S. Chamber. That denial is apropos the U.S. Chamber's bullying. We're only now finding out just how nasty the bullying is likely to become, both nationally and in NC.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Chamber of Commerce Pulls the Supreme Court's Strings
Headline in this a.m.'s NYTimes:Justices Offer Receptive Ear to Business Interests
The article contains this particular factoid: in 16 cases before The Supremes for which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed briefs in support of one side, 13 of them were decided by a 5-4 majority in favor of big business interests.
One of those cases was Citizens United, which unleashed Art Pope and other corporate fat cats to buy any legislature they can personally afford.
That's only a foretaste of what The Supremes now seem poised to grant to big business. From the NYTimes research:
In a single week this month, the court heard arguments in a case brought by the [U.S.] chamber [of commerce] challenging an Arizona law that imposes penalties on companies that hire illegal workers, and it agreed to hear two cases that could reshape class-action and environmental law.
The chamber had urged the court to hear both cases. It said one of them, an enormous sex-discrimination class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart, posed "grave risks for American business." It said the other, a suit by eight states against power companies over carbon dioxide emissions, "has potentially disastrous implications for the U.S. business community."
The court's docket is studded with other important business cases as well, including ones concerning consumer class-action suits and claims of employment discrimination and securities fraud. The chamber has filed supporting briefs in all of them. In AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, for instance, the chamber urged the court to allow companies to use standard-form contracts that in essence forbid consumers who sign them from pursuing class-action suits. In Thompson v. North American Stainless, the chamber asked the court to forbid some employment discrimination claims, saying that "it costs, on average, over $120,000 just to defend a wrongful-discharge claim." Next month, the court will hear arguments in 11 cases. The chamber says it will file briefs in seven of them.
In other words, O my brethren, The Bottomline is king. Justice, fair treatment, and human rights are withering under the Roberts Court. What comes next? We know what comes next: because of the irresponsible and outright criminal behavior of the cowboys in the world banking system, the axe is about to fall on the middle and lower classes of society who will have to bear the burden of less (or actually, "none") so that the corporate kings can continue to live in the style they've created for themselves.
What has become abundantly clear is that President Obama has been captured by these business powers. His behavior in protecting the interests of Big Insurance companies during the health reform kabuki was fair warning. His complete cave on the Bush tax cuts was final proof. Add to that his decision after taking office that Bush domestic spying needed to be kept in place, and we have all the mechanisms poised to enforce the will of the rich elite and the means to squash dissent. Most of the big wigs in the national Democratic Party -- Democratic senators, we're looking particularly at you -- are also sell-outs who are absolutely terrified of being targeted for extinction. So they go along.
Which leaves us exactly where to turn? The guerrilla action of Wikileaks-type exposure of official secrets is beginning to look like our only resource in fighting the power.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Sunday, December 05, 2010
Official Crap and the Real Crap
The Wikileaks uproar has been mainly just noise off in the distance to me, but the increasingly frantic attempts by the Obama administration (acting in this instance like "the Communist Party of China," according to David Samuels in The Atlantic) to shut down Wikileaks -- pressuring Amazon to block it from its servers and probably launching a powerful cyber attack on it -- has finally drawn my full attention. When it becomes government policy to eradicate a whistle-blower, I get more curious about that government.Something's up, that's for sure. Republican Congressman Peter King (NY) wants the Wikileaks founder declared a terrorist threat. Mike Huckabee said that the young pfc who got documents about American foreign/war policy for Wikileaks should be executed. And Wikileaks has done the job that not many journalists -- in fact, none -- have been willing and able to do ... shine the light on the darkest corners of the Obama administration's continuation of the international war machine.
As David Samuels comments, this used to be called "journalism." Now it's considered worthy of the death penalty. The man who launched Wikileaks, Julian Assange, expressed his own contempt for the failure of journalists to do their jobs: "How is it that a team of five people has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined?" he told The Sydney Morning Herald. "It's disgraceful."
United States foreign policy is only one target of Wikileaks. We were promised last week a raft of documents showing the behavior of Bank of America and other powerful corporations, a topic that I have a keen interest in and which probably many American citizens might be shocked to learn, but our own government is doing what it can -- and it can do much -- to block us from ever getting that information.
The 250,000 cables that Wikileaks published this month are only a fraction of the 16 million documents that the U.S. government classifies "top secret" every -- every -- year. In a three-part investigative series by Dana Priest and William Arkin published earlier this year in The Washington Post, Priest & Arkin concluded: "The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive, that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
That's a recipe for official mischief. David Samuels: "The result of this classification mania is the division of the public into two distinct groups: those who are privy to the actual conduct of American policy, but are forbidden to write or talk about it, and the uninformed public, which becomes easy prey for the official lies exposed in the Wikileaks documents."
So ... I guess I'm officially skeptical about all the hysterical, top-down trashing of Julian Assange right now.
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