Posts Tagged ‘america’

No Black Bars for #WallStreet White Collars

Posted: May 23, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logoajclogo2by @anarchyroll
5/22/2014

How many people went to jail for causing the 2008 economic collapse of not just the United States, but the entire global economy?

I thought the answer was zero, it turns out I was wrong. The answer is one, one person from Wall Street went to jail post 2008.

It’s not just an income inequality gap that exists and is expanding in America, there is also a judicial inequality gap. Since I’m white I’ve only noticed this recently. If I was a minority I would have likely not just written about the disparity, but would have been arrested and put in jail already.

Graph courtesy of Project.org

In America, white-collar criminal really is a double entendre. One for the type of crime, a second for the race of the criminal.

Though maybe it is time to update the image and the term. Something more appropriate would be green collar crime. Though the fact that almost all of the white-collar corporate CEO’s were/are white; it is the quantity of dead presidents in their offshore bank account that is the blade to their prison term skate.

What does it say about us as a society that we allow this kind of disparity to justice to become the norm? Is the damage caused by the architects of the ’08 collapse greater than, equal to, or less than the robbery of a single person? How about the rape of a single person? The murder of a single person? Selling drugs to a single person?

I’m not pretending to have an answer here. I am certainly not standing on a pedestal.

Was the damage caused by World Com and Enron akin to a serial robber? A serial killer? A serial rapist? A drug kingpin? How do we measure the collateral damage? Is the death by stabbing of a man in his early twenties different from a retiree who finds out they have lost all of their money in a Ponzi scheme and is destitute without the physical ability to earn for the rest of their life?

What about the people who kill themselves due to an economic depression? What if they have spouses and children? Is their loss, pain, and suffering different from a woman who gets robbed and raped at gun point walking home from the train station?

When entire neighborhoods and towns are put into foreclosure. Hundreds, thousands, millions without work, shelter, food, water, or hope for the future…are the people responsible for causing so much human tragedy somehow less evil, deserving less scorn, and less judicial prosecution than a teenager who runs over a kid while texting and driving? What about drinking and driving?

When blood is spilled, lives taken, innocence stolen in violent crimes we as a society hunt down the criminals, lock them up, throw away the key, and turn the other cheek while they are habitually raped in prison. Victims of violent crimes and their families are forever changed, unable to ever fill the hole created by an evil person that took something that can never be given back.

But is that psychological damage not shared by victims of massive financial crimes against society like in 2008? When we aren’t talking about a single person losing a job or life’s savings but a large percentage of the global population. Are the strains placed on society not akin to that placed on the immediate friends and families of violent crimes?

If not, can we at least as a society agree that we should lock up hedge fund managers, investment bankers, and Ponzi schemers that cause global recessions and depressions as strictly and regularly as we lock up drug dealers and users?

US #Government Grants Immunity for #Telcoms that Already had #Immunity

Posted: May 6, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
5/4/2014

I am not old enough to remember a time when Washington DC wasn’t all smoke and mirrors for the elite to create the illusion of freedom. A great example of this is the current effort by the Obama Administration seeking legal immunity for the major telecommunication companies for complying with the NSA’s bulk metadata collection programs. Why is this typical Washington BS? Because the telcomms already have immunity because they were following the law when they complied with FISA court requests. The White House feels the need to request immunity for telcomms because of the multiple NSA reforms that are currently making their way through Congress. But if the Bush Administration wasn’t prosecuted, Gitmo is still open, and no one from Wall Street went to jail after 2008; is formal immunity really needed from Verizon, Comcast, and the gang?

So a sarcastic blog paragraph, is that it? NO. The real story here is in the earmarks. Both supporters and defenders of the NSA are trying to attach hidden bills, add ons, amendments, etc to the various bills to advance their agenda through the back doors of democracy.

This is a problem not just because of how shady earmarks are in principle, but the fact that both sides are doing it threatens to undo any and all NSA reform. Both sides are saying all the right things but are doing very different things when the doors are closed and the cameras are off, what else is new? So keep an eye and an ear on the legislation that eventually makes it to a vote that reforms and repeals the NSA’s various Big Brother programs. Will they do nothing? Go too far? Not far enough? One will have to go beyond the headline and seek out whether there are earmarks and if so what they entail to know the validity and likely the fate of any changes to the NSA’s ability quest to destroy private lives as we know it.

 

#NSA Admits Under Oath They Lied Under Oath

Posted: April 16, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
4/16/2014

What would happen to you if you lied under oath in a court of law?

What would happen if you lied under oath in front of the United States Congress?

What has happened to anyone in the NSA for doing either? Nothing.

What does that mean? What do you think that means? When a person can admit under oath he lied under oath to not the legislative body of the United States of America.

Whose in charge here? Think about that.

If the NSA can lie under oath without penalty of any kind. Can admit to lying under oath without penalty of any kind. What is there place in the pecking order?

That is what stood out to me about this story. It made me think about consequences. It made me think about power and control.

Those in power, with control, are afforded luxuries that the common person is not. They are allowed to do things that other people aren’t.

Why does the NSA have a $52 billion “black budget”? How is a “black budget” allowed to exist in a democracy?

The go to line on that passé logic is that what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. I think that has been proven to be false in the post Edward Snowden era…

 

Occupy Hope?

Posted: March 30, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms
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eanda logo

by @anarchyroll
10/19/2013

(I recently found this in my drafts section. Apparently I forgot to hit the send button last year.)

Ignorance is bliss says the ostrich with its head buried in the sand.  That is also a core principle of America’s middle class, don’t ask questions, just pay the mortgage.  This blind obedience and fear has bred generational conflict, the most obvious and colorful being the hippie revolution of the 1960s.  Occupy Wall Street hasn’t had the staying power as the hippies, mostly because the hippies grew up to be more selfish and greedy than their square parents could have ever imagined.  The infrastructure that the hippie turned yuppies put into place during the 1970s-80s were designed to suppress and silence rather than embolden and amplify the average person. The average person has in fact been rebranded as a second class citizen, in step with casino gambling being rebranded as the derivatives market.

During the Obama Hope era, another rebranding has occurred, journalism has been rebranded as espionage. More journalists have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 than every other previous president combined. Change we can believe in?  Well certainly for proponents of George Orwell’s 1984 becoming a nonfiction book it is.  People so blinded by red elephants and blue donkeys are so in the trenches of daily punditry that perspective and bigger picture of things has dissolved from their frames of reference.  Almost as if the job of pundits is to provoke the average person into debating with his/her peers rather than their superiors, elders, and elected officials.

The very reason that some people think the Occupy movement to be a failure is why it is a success.  Cynics I have talked to say they didn’t accomplish anything, often unaware there is an active branch still holding rallies and protests in their nearest major metropolitan city.  Occupy has connected the disenfranchised and given a worldwide platform to the voiceless.  Simply because the evening news doesn’t cover them, and the conspiracy theory forums tri labeled them, doesn’t mean the goals of the movement weren’t accomplished.

I could’ve swore that the initial goal of the people gathering in Zuccotti Park was to draw attention to inequality in terms of income and justice for those in the financial sector of America and its damaging effects at an unprecedented scale on the people, places, and things that make up 99% of the developed world.  Am I wrong?  Oh, they never stated an official, singular, vision or purpose? Well read between the fucking lines, or their blogs…whichever.

#CIA & #NSA Shadow Government(s) Slowly Being Sanitized with Daylight

Posted: March 20, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll
3/14/2014

I’m not much for conspiracy theories. Mainly because I’ve been out in the world and seen more incompetency than ability to control an entire country with hundreds of millions of moving parts under wraps. However, I do believe that there are political and economic interests in charge who use shady methods to stay in charge and have the resources to keep their actions secret, quiet, and more hidden from the general public than obvious. The NSA bulk surveillance, war profiteering, media consolidation, and of course all of those political assassinations and military coups during the 1960s would be some examples of hard to ignore conspiracy theory fodder events.

I have been wondering what the effect of social media will have on the military, CIA and NSA. Specifically; as more people are able to instantly stream, document, back up, and show the world an event before they can be black bagged, put in a truck, and sent to Guantanamo; will daylight start to sanitize the shadow government(s)?

Obama, through Jay Carney has officially condoned the Bush era. By not only staying silent, not pursuing an investigation, and now obstructing a Senate investigation into the ‘enhanced interrogations’ Obama is now just as responsible and complicit as Bush and Cheney were and are. Change? Certainly change that big donors and shadow government officials can believe in. The illusion of change, the illusion of choice, truly the legacy Obama leaves behind after two terms. At least his wife is trying to publicly combat obesity, good for her. More and more people are seeing who is pulling the strings and making the machine that is the United States move. There will only be more people with more access to real time information going forward. What effect(s) will this have?

Will the ability to witness, share, and spread information around the entire world in real time get more eyes on the activities of our military/defense agencies? When more people are more aware of the budget sizes and activities of these agencies how will they react? Will this generation spur change or follow the hippies and become even more greedy and war hungry than their parents? I think change will happen slowly, as all important change does. Forget morals, I think people in ‘Merica will not want to be taxed to pay for these trillion dollar defense budgets. They’ll want those resources that are going to other continents being used in their counties. Just a guess…or a hope, whatever.

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