Historian Says Republicans Will Try To Steal 2024 Election

We are currently seeing Republican state legislatures around the country passing new laws to suppress the votes of minorities and young people -- people they expect to vote for the Democratic Party. But that is not all they are doing. Many of these legislatures are also including in those new voting laws the ability of state legislatures to overturn the results of a state election if it goes to Democrats. To be blunt, they are trying to make it possible to steal the 2024 election.

The following is just part of a great op-ed by Dana Millbank in The Washington Post:

In September, I wrote that the United States faced a situation akin to the 1933 burning of Weimar Germany’s parliament, which Hitler used to seize power.

“America, this is our Reichstag moment,” the column said, citing the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder on the lessons of 20th-century authoritarianism. Snyder argued that President Donald Trump had “an authoritarian’s instinct” and was surrounding the election in “the authoritarian language of a coup d’etat.” Predicted Snyder: “It’s going to be messy.”. . .

American democracy survived that coup attempt on Jan. 6. But the danger has not subsided. I called Snyder, who accurately predicted the insurrection, to ask how the history of European authoritarianism informs our current state.

“We’re looking almost certainly at an attempt in 2024 to take power without winning election,” he told me Thursday. Recent moves in Republican-controlled state legislatures to suppress the votes of people of color and to give the legislatures control over casting electoral votes “are all working toward the scenario in 2024 where they lose by 10 million votes but they still appoint their guy.”

History also warns of greater violence. “If people are excluded from voting rights, then naturally they’re going to start to think about other options, on the one side,” Snyder said. “But, on the other side, the people who are benefiting because their vote counts for more think of themselves as entitled — and when things don’t go their way, they’re also more likely to be violent.”

The extinguishing of our Reichstag fire on Jan. 6 made Trump’s failed coup less like 1933 Germany than 1923 Germany, when Hitler’s clownish Beer Hall Putsch failed. Historically, most coup attempts fail. “But a failed coup is practice for a successful coup,” Snyder said. This is what’s ominous about the Republicans’ determination to sabotage investigations that could help us learn from the Jan. 6 insurrection. Also ominous is the move in many Republican-controlled states to ban schools from teaching about systemic racism — “memory laws,” Snyder calls them — which “feeds into this authoritarian turn” by providing cover for the new attempts to disenfranchise more non-White voters. “They’re trying to ban the discussion of things like voter suppression, and it’s precisely the history of voter suppression which allows us to see it for what it is,” Snyder said.

It all boils down to this: “One of our two political parties is currently on an undemocratic track. That’s just the way it is, I think, for the 2022 and 2024 cycles.”

Many others are sounding similar alarms. A survey of 327 political scientists released this week by Bright Line Watch, a project by scholars at Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago and the University of Rochester, found widespread concern: The experts collectively estimated a 55 percent likelihood that at least some local officials will refuse to certify vote counts in 2024, a 46 percent likelihood that one or more state legislatures will pick electors contrary to the popular vote, and a 39 percent likelihood that Congress will refuse to certify the election.

It Looks Like The GOP Is Planning To Steal Future Elections

There was no "massive fraud" in the 2020 election, and election officials (even Republican election officials) did a good job of verifying and protecting the election results. Why then, are Republican state legislatures passing laws to give themselves control of state election boards and the power to overturn election results?

There could only be one reason. They know they can't win elections fairly (especially presidential elections) so they are giving themselves the power to steal those elections. And the Republicans in Congress are happy to let them have that power.

If this is allowed to happen, it will be the death of our democracy.

Wage Theft Could Be Costing Workers $15 Billion Yearly

It's bad enough that too many businesses pay their employees the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour -- a poverty level wage). But many businesses also engage in wage theft, stealing at least $15 billion from their employees each year. And sadly, the government is not making that wage theft hurt the businesses that engage in it. We not only need to raise the minimum wage, but we need to crack down on wage theft!

Consider the following report from The Center for Public Integrity. I post here only part of the report:

Already battered by long shifts and high infection rates, essential workers struggling through the pandemic face another hazard of hard times: employers who steal their wages.

When a recession hits, U.S. companies are more likely to stiff their lowest-wage workers. These businesses often pay less than the minimum wage, make employees work off the clock, or refuse to pay overtime rates. In the most egregious cases, bosses don’t pay their employees at all.

Companies that hire child care workers, gas station clerks, restaurant servers and security guards are among the businesses most likely to get caught cheating their employees, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of minimum wage and overtime violations from the U.S. Department of Labor. In 2019 alone, the agency cited about 8,500 employers for taking about $287 million from workers.

Major U.S. corporations are some of the worst offenders. They include Halliburton, G4S Wackenhut and Circle-K stores, which agency records show have collectively taken more than $22 million from their employees since 2005.

Their victims toil on the lower rungs of the workforce. People like Danielle Wynne, a $10-an-hour convenience store clerk who said her boss ordered her to work off the clock, and Ruth Palacios, a janitor from Mexico who earned less than the minimum wage to disinfect a New York City hospital at the height of the pandemic.

Companies have little incentive to follow the law. The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division, which investigates federal wage-theft complaints, rarely penalizes repeat offenders, according to a review of data from the division. Public Integrity obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act request covering October 2005 to September 2020.

The agency fined only about one in four repeat offenders during that period. And it ordered those companies to pay workers cash damages — penalty money in addition to back wages — in just 14 percent of those cases.

On top of that, the division often lets businesses avoid repaying their employees all the money they’re owed. In all, the agency has let more than 16,000 employers get away with not paying $20.3 million in back wages since 2005, according to Public Integrity’s analysis.

“Some companies are doing a cost-benefit analysis and realize it’s cheaper to violate the law, even if you get caught,” said Jenn Round, a labor standards enforcement fellow at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University.

The federal data provides a revealing — though incomplete — look at a practice that pushes America’s lowest-paid workers further into poverty. The data doesn’t include violations of state wage-theft laws or cases where employees sued. And it misses all the workers who don’t file complaints, either because they’re afraid to or are unaware of their rights.

But some economists say wage theft is so pervasive that it’s costing workers at least $15 billion a year — far more than the amount stolen in robberies.

Thieves Stole Billions Of The Stimulus Bail-Out Money

The stimulus money was supposed to help small businesses in this country survive the recession due to the Coronavirus. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.

Thanks to the incompetence of the Trump administration's overseeing of the distribution of those funds, billions of dollars went to thieves who made fraudulent requests -- and because of that, many small businesses were unable to get any money.

Here's how Bloomberg.com describes what happened:

For a few months this year, a U.S. government aid program meant for struggling small-business owners was handing out $10,000 to just about anyone who asked. All it took was a five-minute online application. You just had to say you owned a business with at least 10 employees, and the grant usually arrived within a few days. 

People caught on fast. In some neighborhoods in Chicago and Miami, it seemed like everyone made a bogus application to the Small Business Administration’s Covid-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan program. Professional thieves from Russia to Nigeria cashed in. Low-level employees at the agency watched helplessly as misspent money flew out the door.

Even after the $20 billion in funding for grants dried up in July, the fraud continued, as scammers looted a separate $192 billion pot of money set aside for loans. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” said an SBA customer-service representative who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job. “I don’t think they had any processes in place. They just sent the money out.”

This account of the disaster-aid program is based on interviews with frontline SBA workers and outside fraud investigators, and on a review of thousands of social-media postings. The unprecedented scale and urgency of the pandemic response made some missteps inevitable, and lawmakers explicitly ordered the agency to prioritize speed over thrift. But decisions by agency leaders contributed to the chaos.

The SBA’s much-vaunted new computer system, built by an outside contractor for $750 million, proved blind to certain types of fraud and sometimes awarded grants even when it spotted disqualifying features. The agency pressured loan officers with little training to churn through applications quickly, while making it difficult for them to detect or report suspicious ones. When officials eventually tightened fraud controls, the result was often delays and rejections for legitimate applicants.

The amount stolen from the program, if it’s ever tallied, will almost certainly be measured in the billions of dollars. But that’s only part of the cost. Many legitimate applicants were denied grants because scammers got the money first. And identity thieves pocketing loan proceeds left an unknown number of Americans saddled with bogus debts.

Could State GOP Legislatures Steal The Election For Trump?

 

There's been some talk in the media about the possibility that Donald Trump could lose the election, but refuse to accept the results and refuse to leave office.

I doubt that would happen. Once the electoral college votes, it's all over. If Trump refuses to leave the White House, then the Marine Guards will remove him, because the winner of the electoral college is the real president -- no matter how much crying and whining Trump does.

But there is a way Trump could lose the election and still remain in office. State legislatures determine how electoral college voters are picked, and some GOP state legislatures could ignore the voters and pick Trump electors. 

I'd like to think that couldn't happen, but Republicans have shown us lately that they don't care about anything but trying to hang on to power. Morality, ethics, honesty, and rule of law mean nothing to them. If they see both houses of the U.S. Congress lost to Democrats, it's within the realm of possibility that they could override state voting results and move to pick electors that would keep a Republican in the White House.

Here's how Barton Gellman puts it in The Atlantic:

“We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors ‘in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.’ Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state ‘can take back the power to appoint electors.’ How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.”

“Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.”

Trump Will Allow Employers To Steal Worker's Tips

(Caricature of Donald Trump us by DonkeyHotey.)

Donald Trump has his products made in other countries that abuse workers with low wages, has imported workers for his U.S. entities to avoid pay decent wages, has stiffed many contractors that did work for him, and has conned many out of thousands of dollars with a fake "university". His moral compass points in only one direction -- toward greed! It shouldn't surprise us then that he now wants to allow employer's to steal the tips of their workers.

From the Economic Policy Institute:

Today (12/4/2017) the Trump administration took their first major step towards allowing employers to legally take tips earned by the workers they employ. The Department of Labor released a proposed rule rescinding portions of its tip regulations, including current restrictions on “tip pooling”—which would mean that, for example, restaurants would be able to pool the tips servers receive and share them with untipped employees such as cooks and dishwashers. But, crucially, the rule doesn’t actually require that employers distribute pooled tips to workers. Under the administration’s proposed rule, as long as the tipped workers earn minimum wage, the employer can legally pocket those tips.

And what we know for sure is that, often, they will do just that. Recent researchsuggests that the total wages stolen from workers due to minimum wage violations exceeds $15 billion each year, and workers in restaurants and bars are much more likely to suffer minimum wage violations than workers in other industries. With that much illegal wage theft currently taking place, it seems obvious that when employers can legally pocket the tips earned by their employees, many will do so.

It is worth noting how deeply unusual it is that there are no actual estimates in the proposal of the amount of money that would be shifted from workers to employers as a result of the rule, even though data that researchers use all the time are available to produce them. The requirements that agencies must follow during the rulemaking process are very clear, and among them is that agencies must assess all quantifiable costs and benefits “to the fullest extent that these can be usefully estimated.” When there is uncertainty about a quantifiable cost or benefit, agencies typically do something like provide a range—they don’t forgo providing an estimate altogether. It is obvious why the department left out the required estimate: this rule is bad for workers, and any estimate would have made that crystal clear.

Make no mistake: as a result of this rule, workers will take home less, and their loss will be employers’ gain. And Trump’s DOL is willing to break the requirements of the rulemaking process to attempt to hide that fact.

Billions Stolen From Workers Each Year By Employers

(The cartoon image of a greedy boss was drawn by Arthur Young in 1911.)

It's bad enough that the wages of most American workers have been stagnant for decades now (while management and owners have grabbed most of the rise in productivity), and that too many workers still make at or near the minimum wage (which is far from a livable wage) -- but those are not all of the ways that employers abuse workers. Billions of dollars in labor and wages are stolen from workers each year by their bosses.

Following is part of an article by Bryce Covert on this issue at Think Progress:

. . . this kind of illegal behavior — wage theft — is more common than robberies. American employers are stealing from their workers at an alarming rate.

In the ten most populous states in the country, employers steal $8 billion a year from their employees simply by paying them less than the legally mandated minimum wage, according to a new report from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). For the 2.4 million workers who are affected — 17 percent of the low-wage workforce — that amounts to an average loss of $64 a week. Given that they’re making just over $200 a week, on average, they miss out on nearly a quarter of their earnings.

For someone working full-time under such conditions, he’ll lose $3,300 a year and bring home just $10,500 total — far below the poverty line.

In fact, the report notes, wage theft is pushing a huge number of families into poverty. The poverty rate among workers who are illegally paid less than the minimum wage is over 21 percent, or three times the poverty rate for all minimum wage workers. If, instead, they were paid what they should be, a third would be lifted out of poverty and the rate would fall to under 15 percent.

And even these staggering numbers are only a sliver of the problem. Given that the study looks at 10 states, which together represent 53 percent of all U.S. employment, the findings can be extrapolated to suggest that employers across the country steal a collective $15 billion from their employees each year. That figure exceeds the value of all property lost to burglaries, car theft, larceny, and robberies combined each year, which was less than $13 billion in 2015.

Yet wage theft is not discussed very much. “It’s a much more abstract problem,” said David Cooper, senior economic analyst at EPI and an author of the new report. “When someone breaks into your home and steals your jewelry, you know it, it’s tangible, you can feel it right away. If your employer is doctoring your hours or asking you to work off the clock, folks in a lot of cases don’t recognize that that’s theft in the same way as someone breaking down your door and stealing goods from your home.”

EPI’s figures also undercount the full extent of wage theft because they’re only focused on one type of illegal behavior: failing to pay employees the legally mandated minimum wage in their state. But wage theft generally encompasses any way that “employers are keeping money that workers are legally entitled to,” Cooper said: failing to pay overtime, pocketing tips, making employees work off the clock, denying them breaks, misclassifying them as exempt from minimum wage rules, and illegally deducting things from their pay. . . .

It’s not an unsolvable problem. One deterrent would be ensuring that when wage thieves are caught, they have to pay. In most places, employers only have to pay a portion of back wages without any other penalty, thus ensuring that it’s cheaper to illegally underpay employees.

“One very concrete solution,” Cooper pointed out, “is having strong penalties.” Some states have passed laws requiring treble damages, or awarding victims three times the value of what they were cheated. In those states, workers experience lower rates of wage theft.

Workers also need more cops on the beat to make sure that employers are paying what they’re supposed to. At the federal level, the agency responsible for such policing, the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, employs about the same number of investigators as it did about 70 years ago, despite the workforce growing sixfold. In 1948 there was one investigator for every 22,600 workers; today it’s one for every 135,000. That’s led to a decrease in cases, which dropped by 63 percent between 1980 and 2015.

Some states have their own robust departments to complement the Wage and Hour Division’s efforts. Others, however, have nothing at all. Florida, which had the highest rate of wage theft among all of the states EPI looked at, also has the fifth-weakest wage laws in the country and in 2002 eliminated its agency that investigated and enforced wage theft.

“Unless you can make it really hurt for businesses to engage in this sort of behavior, in a lot of places the incentive is for them to screw their workers,” Cooper said, “because they’re probably never going to get caught, and if they get caught the worst that’s going to happen is they pay back wages.”

Sanders Campaign Steals Data From The Clinton Campaign

The Sanders and Clinton campaigns both make use of the database provided by the Democratic National Committee (DNC). But they do not share information with each other. There is a firewall separating the information collected by the two campaigns, and both campaigns have agreed to abide by that separation.

Unfortunately, one campaign has now violated that trust.

That firewall was down for a short time recently, and realizing they could now have access to the Clinton campaign data, four Sanders staffers jumped on the unethical opportunity and ran at least 25 searches of the Clinton data. They built lists and saved them to their own accounts. This was not just some volunteers. The effort was led by Sanders campaign political data director Josh Uretsky.

The DNC data base provider realized what was happening after about 25 minutes, and deleted the information collected in accounts they knew about. The DNC has now suspended the Sanders campaign's access to the database until an audit can be done to insure they possess no data they should not have. The Sanders campaign has fired Uretsky, but isn't cooperating with the audit.

Instead, they have gone to court to have their access returned, and say the denial of access is just the DNC trying to give Clinton an advantage in the primary election. That is ridiculous. The DNC has been very careful to stay out of the campaign, and if it had been the Clinton campaign stealing data, they would have denied them access for an audit.

This was nothing short of theft, and it was done by only one campaign -- the Sanders campaign. It cannot be fixed by blustery rhetoric or accusations. They need to apologize and give the DNC what it needs to clear up the situation and restore access.

Sanders has bragged since getting into the presidential race that he plans to run the most ethical campaign of any candidate of any party. Sadly, it looks like some of his employees don't have that same high ethical standard. They seem to think that anything goes as long as they think it will help their candidate. I can understand their frustration over Sanders being unable to turn the race into a real contest, but frustration doesn't justify theft or dirty tricks -- and their unethical actions tend to smear the entire campaign effort.

This mess will undoubtably come up in tonight's Democratic debate. I hope Sanders doesn't try to play it off as the DNC unfairly trying to help Clinton. If he does, I'll lose a lot of the immense respect I have for him.

(The caricatures above of Sanders and Clinton are from DonkeyHotey.)

Police Now Stealing More Money Than All Burglars Combined

(Image is from Taegan Goddard's Wonk Wire.)

In an effort to try to win the drug war, Congress gave police the power to seize the assets that were gained from illegal activities. Unfortunately, the police are misusing that power (which they should never have had in the first place). I have no problem with them seizing the assets of those convicted of drug trafficking, but most of the time now the police are seizing money without convicting the person of any crime at all. And to get the money back is a very difficult thing. The person must prove they did not get the money from any illegal activity, while the police don't have to prove anything.

And the police seizures have grown steadily each year (see chart), and in 2014 those seizures added up to significantly more money than all of the value of items taken in every burglary in the country. In other words, the police stole more money than all of the burglars combined -- with the burglars taking $3.9 billion and the police seizing $4.5 billion. That makes the police the biggest gang of thieves in America.

Is this really what we want? Do we want police to have the ability to take anyone's money -- without even charging them, let alone convicting them of any kind of crime? Giving police this enormous power to seize money (and property) may have sounded like a good idea years ago, but that power is being misused -- and it's time to do away with it.

One might think the federal government would see this and do something about it, but that is unlikely. Federal police are also seizing money and property, and the federal government gets a cut out of the money seized by local and state police. Sadly, both the federal and local governments now see this as another opportunity to fund their activities, and not truly an effort to fight crime. It is theft by government, using the police as their henchmen -- and it needs to be stopped.

Why Aren't These Bankers In Jail ?

Once again we hear of fines being levied against some of the giant banks for illegal (criminal) activity. The following is part of an article from The Huffington Post:

The age of multibillion-dollar bank fines with no admission of wrongdoing is over. The Justice Department announced Wednesday morning that five banks pleaded guilty to market manipulation, while also paying billions of dollars in fines. 

Barclays, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan and the Royal Bank of Scotland admitted to illegally distorting foreign exchange markets. The banks formed what they called "The Cartel" and aimed to set a key currency marker, known as "the fix," at mutually beneficial values. 

The fix is set every day at 4 p.m. London time and is used in the more than $5 trillion currency market to determine the price of trades and the value of large institutional holdings. Traders at the banks used instant messaging chat rooms to discuss where to set the fix.

In addition to admitting guilt, the banks will also pay fines. Barclays will pay $650 million, Citigroup $925, million J.P. Morgan $550 million and RBS $395 million. Barclays will pay another $1.3 billion to New York State, federal and U.K. regulators.

The Justice Department said it was charging the banks' parent companies because the wrongdoing was pervasive, and that the banks' punishment was "fitting considering the long-running and egregious nature of their anticompetitive conduct." To put the fines in context, in 2014, Barclay's net income was $3.5 billion, Citigroup's was $7.3 billion, J.P. Morgan's was $21.8 billion and RBS' was $3.9 billion.

Will this stop the giant banks from engaging in criminal activity? After all, aren't those fines large enough to hurt those banks? Sadly, the answer to both of those questions is NO. While the fines might sound big to us normal Americans, they are not that large to these banks. The truth is that the fines don't even cover the amount of money the banks stole -- meaning the banks still are turning a profit off that criminal activity.

This is far from the first time the giant banks have been caught engaging in illegal activities to fatten their already enormous profits. And why shouldn't they continue to do that? If they are not caught, they get huge profits from that criminal behavior -- and if they are caught (like they were this time), they still profit from the illegal acts (just not as much as if they hadn't been caught). In other words, there is no reason for them to stop stealing.

So, how can we stop this illegal banking activity? I believe it would require at least two things:

1. Make the fines big enough to more than cover the money made from the illegal behavior. I would suggest something like 20% to 30% more than they earned from the criminal behavior.

2. Send the CEO and the CFO of any banks found to be engaging in criminal activity to prison for at least ten years (and anyone else in the bank found to be participating in that criminal behavior).

You can be sure that if you or I stole from one of these banks we would be sent to prison. Why shouldn't the same thing apply when the banks steal? No bank or banker should be to big to pay for their crimes.

(Note -- the cartoon image above was found at the website of the Western Rifle Shooters Association.)

Israel No Longer Inhabits The Moral High Ground

After World War II, most nations were shocked at what had happened to the jewish people in Europe (and embarrassed by their failure to act on that earlier). And to make up for that, they voted in the United Nations to partition Palestine to create Israel. For many years, the state of Israel occupied the moral high ground -- providing a home for their people and making an attempt to get along with their neighbors in the area.

Unfortunately, that is no longer true. At some point in the recent past, Israel changed. Their government decided it could get more by delaying the peace process, while stealing Palestinian land and forcing that population into an ever shrinking area where they deny rights and control movement. And every now and then they attack that shrinking area in the name of "self-defense". They have given up the moral high ground in favor of violent, oppressive, and thuggish behavior -- and they are doing that so they can continue to steal the Palestinian's land.

The maps above make this perfectly clear. Note that the green areas (Palestinian land) has been radically shrunk, and this continues to happen as they build more permanent settlements of that land.

The United States must share at least some of the blame for this. We continue to send large amounts of money and arms to Israel, and we protect Israel from being punished for its theft and thuggish behavior (even though most civilized nations have demanded that Israel stop this. It is time to change this, and it must be done before that map ceases to have any green on it at all.

Jim Hightower Blasts Businesses Paying A "Poverty Wage"

(This photo of Jim Hightower is from the Texas Tribune.)

I have made it clear many times on this blog that I believe the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a poverty wage -- and nothing more than wage theft. But Jim Hightower, one of the leading progressives in the Lone Star State, has a way with words (that I only wish I had) -- so I bring you his latest remarks on the minimum wage from his own excellent website:

The good news is that it's not all bad news these days.

Take the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour – please! That's a poverty wage, a shameful stain on our extremely rich nation. But don't count on Washington to lift our wage floor – indeed, pigheaded Republican congress critters refuse to consider it, even declaring there should be no wage floor to sustain America's middle-class framework.

So where's the good news? Probably right where you live. Millions of low-wage workers themselves – from fast food workers to adjunct college professors – have been organizing and mobilizing, pushing local leaders to take action against the immoral inequality that's ripping our society apart and sinking our economy. Sure enough, local officials are responding – Seattle, Chicago, New York City, Austin, Providence, San Francisco, and even Oklahoma City, as well as other locales, either have raised their wage floors or are battling the corporate lobbyists to get the job done.

And here's a pleasant surprise: Breaking away from the McDonald's-Domino-Taco Bell herd of low-wage exploiters, several smaller fast food chains are acting on their own, raising their starting pay levels as high as $15 an hour, plus benefits. The Boloco burrito chain in New England, for example, has raised its minimum to $9 an hour, plus subsidizing its employees' commuting costs and contributing to their 401(k) fund. A Boloco co-founder says, "If we're talking about building a business that's successful, but our employees can't go home and pay their bills, to me that success is a farce."

Exactly! If you can't pay your workers a decent wage, then you don't have a legitimate business. The multimillion-dollar executives at poverty-pay outfits like McDonald's aren't running a business, they're running a labor extortion racket.

Green Party Blasts Israeli Land Theft And Terrorist Violence

Israel is once again sending troops into the Palestinian Territory of Gaza. They say it is in retaliation for Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlements and to find the tunnels that Palestinians are using to make those attacks. What they won't tell you is that the settlements they are defending are illegal Israeli settlements on Palestinian land -- settlements that have been condemned by most nations as theft.

They also won't tell you that those tunnels can just as easily be found and destroyed from the Israeli side of the border as from the Gaza side. Or that the shelling from ships off-shore just kills indiscriminately and has nothing to do with the tunnels. There is no real justification for this latest Israeli aggression against Gaza (or for that matter, the continued occupation of, and theft of Palestinian land). While I support Israel's right to exist, I cannot condone their land theft, or their continued violence against civilians to try and justify that theft.

On this matter, I find I'm in general agreement with the Green Party. Here is what Green Party Shadow Cabinet member Ajamu Baraka wrote on July 16th:

“Protective Edge,” the cartoonish name given to the latest Israeli military offensive against the occupied people of Palestine, is representative of the inverted reality whereby the 1.7 million captive and largely defenseless Palestinians in Gaza are the vicious aggressors against the peace-loving settlers of Israel. Similar to the inverted reality in the U.S., where the myth of the innocent settler was created to justify the systematic slaughter of Indigenous peoples, the genocidal policies of Israel are camouflaged by the transformation of its position from an armed colonial invader to one of victim.

This repositioning is aided and abetted in the U.S. by a corporate media whose worldview and angle of reporting is framed by the innocent settler narrative. This narrative simultaneously liquidates and normalizes the colonial relationship between the colonizer and the colonized so that the occupied territories are not occupied but transformed into “disputed” territories and all forms of resistance on the part of Palestinians becomes terroristic.

Informed by this imperial vision, the corporate media not only parrot Israel’s victim narrative but go even further with the creation of the two-equal-sides fiction. Mainstream coverage laments how both sides are locked in battle or a spiral of violence, giving the absurd impression that the violence in the occupied territories is a conflict between two forces with similar power and equal moral standing.

“The corporate media parrot Israel’s victim narrative.”

It should be clear that attempting to conceptually equate the force of the state of Israel, one of the most powerful militaries in the world, with a resistance movement of a captive people trapped by land and sea in an open-air concentration camp on one of the most densely populated strips of land on the planet is a position that is fundamentally immoral. Yet for most editors and reporters in the U.S., pro-Zionist liberals and their counterparts in the Christian Zionist movement as well as some elements of the European press and public, the conceptual blinders of white supremacist colonial consciousness makes it impossible to see the immorality inherent in this construction of the so-called conflict.

The position for most of the world is that the latest assault on the Palestinian people is a war crime and an ongoing crime against humanity. That position was affirmed by the international Court of Justice, which ruled that as an occupying military power Israel has an obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 to protect the rights of civilians under military occupation. i

Within this legal framework, the killing of civilians under occupation, indiscriminate shelling of Palestinian communities, collective punishments, house demolitions, arbitrary imprisonment, the theft of water and other natural resources and the building of settlements in occupied territories are all considered war crimes and crimes against humanity.ii

That is the real story that should be communicated to the general public in the U.S. But instead, the public is being led to believe that the Israeli military assault is a legally and morally justified response to aggression from Hamas. From this perspective there is no special responsibility on the part of the Israeli authorities to protect the rights of Palestinians under military occupation, and the actions of the Israeli government in response to the killings of the three Israeli teenagers is seen as a measured and rational response.

Colonialism and the humanitarian fraud

Only the most naive believe the current military assault has anything to do with “defense” issues related to the symbolic resistance offered from Hamas via the firing of rockets into Israel. Honest commentators on this issue know that Israel provoked the response from the Palestinian resistance with the mass repression it launched in Gaza after the killings of the three Israeli teenagers in order to use the response to justify its attack on Hamas. An attack meant to destroy the newly established unity government of the Palestinians.

The colonialist mentality sees any resistance, no matter the form, as illegitimate, punishable by death and unrelenting terror. That message is clear for Palestinians as their homes are reduced to dust and the people dig out the bodies of their children, spouses, fathers and grandmothers. The other message communicated to Palestinians, once again, and which they understand all too well, is that compared to the lives of the settlers their lives are worthless and there is no “responsibility to protect” for them.

“Israel provoked the response from the Palestinian resistance with the mass repression it launched in Gaza after the killings of the three Israeli teenagers in order to use the response to justify its attack on Hamas.”

The assault on the people and the institutions of Gaza has as its objective the eradication of the people of Gaza – not necessarily in the physical sense, only because at this stage in global consciousness any such attempt would galvanize universal opposition, but to erase Gaza as a functioning society, to destroy it politically, culturally, spiritually and psychologically. A process that IIan Pappe refers to as “incremental genocide,iii that whatever the label is terroristic in its’ most naked, brutal and devastating effect.

When genocide or systematic ethnic cleansing is not a viable option, reducing the indigenous population to a weak, terrorized and dependent condition is the next best thing for settler policy. The targeting of the civilian infrastructure and governing institutions by the Israeli military makes it clear that this is the objective of the current attack on Gaza.

The international community has failed to hold the Israeli state accountable for war crimes and other serious violations of international law over the last four decades. Human rights organizations and United Nations special procedures have produced detailed reports on the crimes committed by Israel over the last four decades without the perpetrators being brought to justice.iv And when it comes to Israel, humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect is exposed as the imperialist ideological construct that it is.

Images of Palestinian children being dug out of bombed-out residential buildings have not resulted in calls for humanitarian intervention to save a population that may be the most brutalized on the planet today. Instead, weak and pathetic calls are made for “both sides” to show restraint and protect “civilians” as though a distinction can be made or is ever made between combatants and non-combatants when it is the whole people who are seen as the enemy by Israeli authorities.

“The only solution to the original sin of the Zionist project is authentic decolonization.”

Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights points out the hypocrisy of the West when it comes to Israel.

“…instead of condemning such recourse to massive violence as ‘aggression’ that violates the UN Charter and fundamental international law principles, the reaction of Western diplomats and mainstream media has perversely sided with Israel. From the UN Secretary-General to the president of the United States, the main insistence has been that Hamas must stop all rocket attacks while Israel is requested ever so politely to show ‘maximum restraint’”.v

What is the future for Palestine? Is reconciliation possible within the context of an ongoing colonial relationship? Is a two-state solution still viable with more than 500,000 settlers occupying almost half of the land that was supposed to be the Palestinian state, a land base that is just 22 percent of original Palestine before the establishment of Israel?

Frantz Fanon argues that:

“One world, either that of the settler or that of the native, must be destroyed to bring the colonial system to an end. Not simply a military defeat or a political deal – the total destruction of the other mode of living.”

As the Israelis continue to steal Palestinian land, murder, degrade and humiliate Palestinian people, and create “facts on the ground” that make it impossible to establish a viable, independent Palestinian state, it is becoming clear that the only solution to the original sin of the Zionist project is authentic decolonization where the presence, humanity and sovereignty of the colonized is restored.

Authentic decolonization is the only solution because the inner logic of the colonial/capitalist process suggests that Fanon’s assertion is correct – that there can be no reconciliation of Palestinian self-determination and independent development with the continuation of the Israeli state as a settler state. Because even within the framework of the so-called two state solution, the material basis of the Israeli colonial project is dependent on the continued expansion and expropriation of Palestinian land and the subordination of Palestinian people.

So while some Palestinians and their supporters still hope for a two-state solution, Israeli rulers also understand Fanon’s position that “only one mode of living will survive” and are moving to destroy Palestinian resistance. This is the real story of Gaza and all of the occupied territories – an ongoing crime that degrades all of us who are forced to witness it.

Suits Trump Guns When It Comes To Stealing In The U.S.

The following chart will be rather shocking to most people in this country. We have been led to believe that street criminals, the ones who use a weapon to rob individuals, banks, gas stations, and convenience stores are the people we need to be worrying about -- the ones doing the most damage to our society, and the ones who steal the most money. But that is not even remotely true.

The chart above shows that street criminals are dwarfed by businesses that steal from their employees. And I'm not talking about businesses that take from their employees by refusing to pay a decent livable wage. These are employers that refuse to pay employees anything at all for work they have done. They steal the wages they promised to pay.

Note that the figure is more than twice as much as all of the money taken by street criminals -- and that only counts what the Department of Labor has verified and forced businesses to pay back. Much more is still being investigated, or has not been reported to the Labor Department.

But even that figure is small. It does not count what businesses steal from consumers, from Main Street to Wall Street. Most street criminals are pitiful amateurs, who need a weapon to overcome their fears and commit their crimes. The real professionals wear a suit, and will steal much more using only a smile and a few lies.

It would be nice if our government (at all levels) considered these criminals to be as dangerous to our society as the street criminals.

Theft

Seven Ripoffs The Capitalist Corporate Media Won't Tell You About

I wish I could claim credit for this, but I can't. It was written by author and college teacher Paul Buchheit, and I found it at the website Common Dreams. These seven capitalist corporate ripoffs are not all of the ripoffs by any means, but they still need to be exposed. Mr Buchheit tells us:

Tax-avoiding, consumer-exploiting big business leaders are largely responsible for these abuses. Congress just lets it happen. Corporate heads and members of Congress seem incapable of relating to the people that are being victimized, and the mainstream media seems to have lost the ability to express the views of lower-income Americans.

1. Corporations Profit from Food Stamps

It's odd to think about billion-dollar financial institutions objecting to cuts in the SNAP program, but some of them are administrators of the program, collecting fees from a benefit meant for children and other needy Americans, and enjoying subsidies of state tax money forservices that could be performed by the states themselves. They want more people on food stamps, not less. Three corporations have cornered the market: JP Morgan, Xerox, and eFunds Corp.

According to a JP Morgan spokesman, the food stamp program "is a very important business to JP Morgan. It's an important business in terms of its size and scale...The good news from JP Morgan's perspective is the infrastructure that we built has been able to cope with that increase in volume.."

2. Crash the Economy, Get Your Money Back. Die with a Student Loan, Stay in Debt.

The financial industry has manipulated the bankruptcy laws to ensure that high-risk derivatives, which devastated the market in 2008, have FIRST CLAIM over savings deposit insurance, pension funds, and everything else.

But the same banker-friendly "bankruptcy reform" has ensured that college graduates keep their student loans till they die. And sometimes even after that, as the debt is transfered to their parents.

3. Almost 70% of Corporations Are Not Required to Pay ANY Federal Taxes

And that's even before tax avoidance kicks in. The 'nontaxable' designation exempts 69% of U.S. corporations from taxes, thus sparing them the expense of hiring tax lawyers to contrive tax avoidance strategies.

The Wall Street Journal states, "The percentage of U.S. corporations organized as nontaxable businesses has grown from about 24% in 1986 to about 69% as of 2008, according to the latest-available Internal Revenue Service data. The percentage of all firms is far higher when partnerships and sole proprietors are included."

In recent years the businesses taking advantage of the exemption include law firms, hedge funds, real estate partnerships, venture capital firms, and investment banks.

4. Lotteries Pay for Corporate Tax Avoidance

This means revenue comes from the poorest residents of a community rather than from billion-dollar corporations. Many of the lottery players don't realize how bad the odds are. Fill out $2 tickets for 12 hours a day for 50 years and you'll have half a chance of winning.

Some astonishing facts reveal the extent of the problem. Low-income households spend anywhere from five to nine percent of their earnings on lotteries. A Pennsylvania surveyfound that nearly half of low-income residents planned to gamble at a newly-opened casino. America's gambling losses in 2007 were nine times greater than just 25 years before.

5. The National Football League Pays No Federal Taxes

One of the most profitable organizations in America, with billions in tickets, TV rights, and merchandise sales, and with an NFL Commissioner who earned more money than the CEOs of Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, and AT&T, is considered a non-profit. It has a tax-exempt status.

It gets even worse. While the individual teams themselves are not exempt from federal taxes, they enjoy multi-million-dollar subsidies from their states for new and refurbished stadiums. Fans - and non-fans - of the Washington Redskins, the Cincinnati Bengals, the Minnesota Vikings, the Seattle Seahawks, the San Francisco 49ers, and the Pittsburgh Steelers are among those who pay taxes for their hometown football fields. New Orleans taxpayers paid for leather stadium seats. For the Dallas Cowboys, a $6 million property tax bill was waived.

A Harvard University urban planning study determined that 70 percent of the capital cost of NFL stadiums has been provided by taxpayers, rather than by NFL owners.

6. Live on Park Avenue, Get a Farm Subsidy

A disturbing but fascinating report called "Farm Subsidies and the Big Dogs" lists Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York City, in that order, as the worst offenders.

• In New York, "Many entities receive the federal subsidies at their downtown office buildings, such as 30 Rockefeller Plaza, or at their million dollar residential condos."
• In Chicago, "Nearly every neighborhood in the city receives federal farm subsidy payments - including the Gold Coast, Downtown-Loop, Lincoln Park, and even the President's neighbors in Hyde Park."
• In Washington, "Even U.S. Senators are receiving farm subsidy checks."

Perhaps more of us should become farmers. In Florida, according to Forbes, "anyone could legally qualify their land as farmland by stocking it with a few cows." Wealthy heir Mark Rockefeller received $342,000 to NOT farm, to allow his Idaho land to return to its natural state.

7. Profit Margin Magic: Turning a dollar into $100,000

Which costs the consumer more, printer ink or bottled water? Calculations by DataGeneticsreveal that the ink in a $16.99 cartridge comes to almost $3,400 per gallon. The cost of a gallon of cartridge ink would buy enough gasoline to run the average car for over two years.

Water seems to cost less, until the details are factored in: we're paying for our own public water, which we've given away almost for free, and which comes back to us in no better condition than when it started.

For every 100,000 bottles sold, Nestle pays the proceeds from ONE bottle to those of us (the taxpayers) who own the water.

So This Is Capitalism..

Consumer-exploiting, tax-avoiding, profit-maximizing, responsibility-shirking, winner-take-all capitalism. An economic system which, as Milton Friedman once believed, "distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people."

(The image above is from madmikesamerica.com.)