The “It Gets Better Project” is an effort to comfort LGBT kids and teens who face abuse and fear over their sexual orientation. Some are so tormented by cultural norms that they try (and succeed) in committing suicide. It Gets Better videos help encourage them to believe that the distress does get better. Dan Savage was the driving force behind this effort.
The Project has just released some beautiful and moving videos from employees of tech companies, including Apple and Adobe.
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
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The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.
– Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel prize-winning economist writing in Vanity Fair, describing the harrowing growth in income inequality in the united states. Read the whole article for the ugly and dangerous truth.
The Obama administration has now issued new rules that allow domestic terror suspects to be held and questioned longer before being given Miranda warnings. Yet again, the Constitution (and Supreme Court precedent) takes a back seat to fear.
The existence of the memorandum was reported by The New York Times in December, but the Justice Department refused to make it public. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal published an article containing excerpts from the document, and The Times later obtained access to a full copy.
Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the memo could not alter a constitutional right. He portrayed it as clarifying existing flexibility in the rule — especially when investigators are willing to risk sacrificing the ability to use a suspect’s statements in trial.
President Obama has continued his attack on basic constitutional and legal principles with an astonishing new order that allows investigators to not only hold domestic terror suspects for longer periods but to deny them Miranda rights under a strained interpretation of the public safety exception. Obama had attempted to get this change from Congress but was rebuffed. He has now again adopted a tactic of his predecessor and acted unilaterally to trump recognized constitutional rights.
What is happening in this country? Do you think that, in a nation that purports apply the law to all citizens equally, that a citizen seized by the government within the United States should have a right to have he claims of torture by US personnel at least heard in court? I certainly do.
A federal judge on Thursday threw out a lawsuit brought by a man convicted of plotting terrorism and who alleged he was tortured at a Navy brig in South Carolina, saying a trial would create “an international spectacle.”
U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel ruled Jose Padilla, arrested as an enemy combatant, had no right to sue for constitutional violations and that the defendants in the case enjoyed qualified immunity.
Padilla claimed he was illegally detained as an enemy combatant and then held in a brig near Charleston where he was tortured. His lawsuit named government and brig officials, including Defense Secretary Robert Gates and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
So, because a trial could cause a “spectacle,” government officials and former government officials are granted immunity? What protection does any citizen have when governmental abuse cannot be taken to court?
… our political officials are Too Important, and engaged in far Too Weighty Matters in Keeping Us Safe, to subject them to the annoyance of the rule of law. It’s much more important to allow them to Fight The Terrorists without restraints than to bother them with claims that they broke the law and violated the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. That’s the mentality that has resulted in full-scale immunity for both political and now private-sector elites in a whole slew of lawbreaking scandals — from Obama’s refusal to investigate Bush-era crimes or high-level Wall Street criminality to retroactive immunity for lawbreaking telecoms and legal protection for defrauding mortgage banks. With very few exceptions — yesterday’s ruling, for instance, brushed aside a contrary decision from a Bush-43-appointed federal judge in California last year that refused to dismiss Padilla’s lawsuit against John Yoo for having authorized his torture (that decision is on appeal) – Executive Branch officials and the federal judiciary have conspired to ensure that the former are shielded from judicial scrutiny even for the most blatant and horrifying crimes.
There are legalistic questions involved in cases such as the one brought by Padilla — i.e., whether courts should allow monetary damages to be sought against government officials for Constitutional violations in the absence of a Congressional statute (a “Bivens” claim) and whether such officials should enjoy “qualified immunity” for their illegal acts where the illegality is unclear (as Rumsfeld absurdly alleged the torture of Padilla was) – but one key fact is not complex. Not a single War on Terror detainee has been accorded any redress in American courts for the severe abuses to which they were subjected (including innocent people being detained for years, rendered and even tortured), and worse, no detainee has been allowed by courts even to have their claims heard. After the U.S. Government implemented a worldwide regime of torture, lawless detention, and other abuses, the doors of the American justice system have been slammed shut in the face of any and all victims seeking to have their rights vindicated or even their claims heard. If an American citizen can’t even sue political officials who lawlessly imprison and torture him in his own country — if political leaders are vested with immunity from a claim of this type — what rational person can argue that the rule of law or the Constitution binds our government officials?
Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn’t. Nobody ever thought that that’s what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that. If the current society wants to outlaw discrimination by sex, hey we have things called legislatures, and they enact things called laws. You don’t need a constitution to keep things up-to-date.
– US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, explaining that discrimination against women is not prohibited by the US Constitution.
Perhaps he should re-read Section 1 of the 14th Amendment and its requirement of equal protection in regards to government actions:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
No less dismaying is his notion that women, gays and other emerging minorities should be left at the mercy of the prevailing political majority when it comes to ensuring fair treatment. It is an “originalist” approach wholly antithetical to the framers’ understanding that vital questions of people’s rights should not be left solely to the political process. It also disrespects the wording of the Equal Protection Clause, which is intentionally broad, and its purpose of ensuring a fairer society.
I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage. And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.
Today, the Senate has taken an historic step toward ending a policy that undermines our national security while violating the very ideals that our brave men and women in uniform risk their lives to defend. By ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay. And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love.
But we should also note that what won in the end was facts and testimony and truth. There is no rational basis to keep qualified and dedicated gays from serving in the military. It was confidence in this truth – not assertion of any special identity or special rights – that carried us forward. And the revelation of the actual lives and records of gay servicemembers – all of whom came out of the closet and risked their livelihoods to testify to the truth – has sunk in widely and deeply. These men and women had the courage to serve their country and then the courage to risk their careers, promotions, pensions, salaries and, in some cases, lives to bring this day about. They represent an often silent majority of gay men and women who simply want to belong to the families and country and churches and communities they love, and to contribute to them without having to lie about themselves. This, in the end, was not about the right to be gay, but the right to serve America. Like all great civil rights movements, it is in the end about giving, not taking.
What is debt? Does a borrower have more than a contractual duty to repay a loan? Is it immoral to default on a debt? And where, by the way, do creditors get the money they loan?
David Graber, in an excerpt from an upcoming book called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, reviews the history of debt and its impact on contemporary views of the mingling of debt and morality in the United States and elsewhere. Fascinating.
But if the welfare state must be destroyed in order, ostensibly, to settle our debts, we should ask ourselves: To whom, exactly, are those debts owed? And where did our creditors get the money that was loaned to us? (The answer, of course: We owe the very financial institutions we recently bailed out for making fraudulent and idiotic loans; they didn’t get the money anywhere, they just made it up.) Whenever such questions have been openly asked in Europe, riots have tended to ensue.
Such eruptions make it clear that debt must be removed from that rarefied sphere of morality arbitrated by transnational institutions (whose representatives are also its main beneficiaries), where it has become ensconced, and returned to the sphere of open political debate. In the ancient world, it was not debt that was considered sacred, but rather the power to make it disappear. We are, it seems, long overdue for a contemporary Jubilee, one that would affect consumer debt as well as international debt, and that would not only relieve a great amount of human suffering but also remind us that money is not ineffable, that paying one’s debt is not the essence of morality, that borrowing and lending are human arrangements, and that if democracy is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things differently.
It is significant that, since Hammurabi, great imperial states have invariably resisted this kind of politics. Athens and Rome established the paradigm: Even when confronted with continual debt crises, they insisted on legislating around the edges, softening the impact; they eliminated obvious abuses like debt slavery and used the spoils of empire to throw all sorts of extra benefits at their poorer citizens (who, after all, provided the rank and file of their armies) so as to keep them afloat. They did all this in such a way as to fend off any challenge to the principle of debt itself. The US has taken a remarkably similar approach: eliminating the worst abuses (e.g., debtors’ prisons), using the fruits of empire to provide subsidies, visible and otherwise, and, recently, manipulating currency rates to flood the country with cheap goods from China. Never has the governing class allowed anyone to question the sacred principle that we all must pay our debts. That principle has recently been exposed to be a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we all don’t have to pay our debts. Only some of us do.
If people take an affirmative act of engaging in, in this case, aviation — they want to get on a plane — they’re taking an affirmative act to do that. Then, yes, there is authority to do the administrative search for public safety purposes.
– John Pistole, head of the Transportation Security Administration, defending airport searches without probable cause.
Though I understand why air travel presents special security circumstances, it’s nevertheless worth pointing out where Mr. Pistole’s logic quickly leads. After all, Americans take affirmative action to do almost everything – to drive a private vehicle into a downtown area, to board a bus or a train or a ferry or a subway, to attend a concert or a baseball game or a political rally, to do their Christmas shopping at a mall rather than online, to crowd into a dance club on Saturday night, to buy their vegetables at a crowded outdoor market, etc. All these venues are plausible targets for a terrorist attack.
Suddenly air travel doesn’t seem so different – not to me, anyway.
Does Mr. Pistole believe that all the places I’ve described afford citizens less protection from the Fourth Amendment because everyone there made an affirmative decision to be present?
… that is, tax cuts for every family earning with less than $250,000 and single people earning less than $200,000. This would mean all but the richest 2% of Americans would get a tax cut. Only three Republicans voted for the bill. And if the GOP truly wants to address the deficit, why not tax the richest 2% (including me) who, as a group, have done very, wery well in this country over the past decade while families earning far less have suffered job losses, real estate losses, expiring unemployment benefits and very tangible human suffering.
Oh, and let’s be clear. Everyone in the country would get a tax cut on the first $250,000 they earn. Including the rich. That is how marginal tax rates work. Only income above the $250,000 would face a tax increase.
So far, this is the only tax cut bill that has passed either chamber and the Senate GOP claims it will block all action on any issue in the Senate until the Senate passes tax cuts for those with incomes above $250,000 (or $200,000 for single people). Does this sound fair to you?
In any event, the House action has really pissed off John Boehner who called it “chicken crap“.
There are 238,781 households in John Boehner’s district. There are 2,824 of them with an income above $200,000. That’s 1.1 percent. And that 1.1 percent is too large, as many of those people make between $200,000 and $250,000, and so every dollar of their income will be eligible for the tax cuts the Democrats are pushing.
So in all likelihood, what separates a tax cut bill that’s “chicken crap” from a tax cut bill that’s great is its treatment of the richest 1 percent of households in Boehner’s district. And $700 billion slapped right onto the deficit. If Republicans win this debate despite the unpopularity of their position and its violent contradiction to their stated concern for the deficit, it’ll be one of the most impressive coups in recent political memory.
Wall Street got bailouts. The auto companies got bailouts. And Boehner wants to give the wealthy even more. Why can’t we help real people who lack the power to demand special privileges?
One of the items revealed in the Wikileaks document dump is that the Obama administration (and several prominent Republicans) actively intervened in Spain to block a probe of American torture policy under the Bush Administration as it was applied to several Spanish citizens. Shameful and amazing.
Diplomats routinely monitor and report on legal cases that affect national interests. These cables show that the U.S. embassy in Madrid had far exceeded this mandate, however, and was actually successfully steering the course of criminal investigations, the selection of judges, and the conduct of prosecutors. Their disclosure has created deep concern about the independence of judges in Spain and the manipulation of the entire criminal justice system by a foreign power.
David Cole, writing in the New York Review of Books, explains why Obama’s effort to “look forward” and not backward on the torture committed by the Bush administration, will fail and that a full accounting, at a minimum, is necessary to purge the damage done by this country’s official policy of torture under Bush.
The torturers—President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, and Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, to name just a few—are not held responsible. They remain free to travel the lecture circuit and publish books bragging about their crimes. It is the families of victims of the embassy bombings who must pay the price—in foregone justice—for the crimes the Bush administration perpetrated in its “war on terror.”
It turns out that looking forward, not back, will never resolve the torture legacy. Until we own up to and provide a reckoning for the moral and criminal wrongs committed by officials at the very highest levels of the former administration, the fact that we tortured will continue to fester—and cause problems for its successor. The prevailing view in Washington seems to be that we should move on, but such wrongs cannot be forgotten.
Anyway, he has been fired. Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox concluded that he had engaged in “borderline stalking behavior” and inappropriately used state resources.
Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way im wearin it for them is if they all commit suicide. I cant believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid. We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed therselves because of their sin.
– Clint McCance, vice-president of the Midland School District in Pleasant Plains, Arkansas. He has since said he will resign. More from Jonathan Turley.
Update:Here is an interview of this guy on Anderson Cooper.
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