February 2009 archive

Not only are there no jobs there is also nobody home.

This diary will encapsulate our current dilemma with political economy in terms of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of the “pleasure principle” and of the “reality principle” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.  This will encompass a general exploration, helped along by Marcuse’s use of Freud in Eros and Civilization, of how the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle are concepts that can be used to “read” society and history.  I will conclude with a reading of our own society at this historical juncture, which will criticize how the present and future are being approached.

(crossposted at Big Orange)

This Pony Party is an open thread!  Please do not rec.

Compare the treatment of a disgraced banker like Andy Hornby with BMW workers like Roger Freitis, sacked at an hour’s notice

Disgraced bank boss Andy Hornby

Wrecked the HBOS banking group but pocketed

£1.3 million in bonuses

Left the bank with a £2.4 million pension pot

Now a ‘consultant’ with Lloyds TSB and scraping by on £66,000 a

month

Former BMW worker Roger Freitis

Worked for BMW on a temporary

contract for two years but sacked with an hour’s notice

Helped to make his

firm £3.4 billion in profits in 2007

Now on the dole with a child and

mortgage

The following should be read alongside this article:

» Bankers’ ‘sorry’ just isn’t good enough

»Fury as Cowley workers sacked with hour’s notice

» Derek Simpson and the ‘British Jobs’ slogan danger

» Union fight derailed by reliance on Gordon Brown

» Agency staff: Labour blocked workers’ rights

© Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include an active link to the original.

This started out as just a ‘to be comment’, with the NPR report just below, updating the reports surfacing about the revisit of the policy on our returning soldiers killed in action in the two combat theaters. I kept finding abit more so included, along with an upcoming HBO presentation, this coming weekend, of a documentary on the journal written by an officer as he accompanied a soldier back to his family and community.

Rethinking Media Coverage Of Fallen Troops

Dan Froomkin usually has some interesting things to say about what’s going on in Washington.  Usually, his perspective his detailed enough to be interesting, but not so overly wonkish as to be aimed at insiders.

From RawStory Tuesday morning…

Obama, not Bush, now seeking delay of Rove deposition

John Byrne, Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Former Bush Deputy White House Chief of Staff Karl Rove has a new president urging Congress not to force him to testify next week.

President Barack Obama.

In a court brief quietly filed Monday, Michael Hertz, Obama’s acting assistant attorney general, said it was necessary to delay an effort to force Rove to be deposed in a congressional investigation into the firing of nine US Attorneys and the alleged political prosecution of a former Alabama governor.

Hertz said an effort was underway to find a “compromise” for Rove, and requested two weeks to broker a deal before proceeding in court.

“The inauguration of a new president has altered the dynamics of this case and created new opportunities for compromise rather than litigation,” Hertz wrote in the brief released late Monday by McClatchy’s Washington, D.C. bureau. “At the same time, there is now an additional interested party – the former president – whose views should be considered.”

The House Judiciary Committee sued the Bush Administration to force Rove to testify last year, saying that Rove shouldn’t be covered by executive privilege. They won. But their case has been held up by an appeal, and Hertz’s filing was the Obama administration’s first legal weighing-in on the matter. Obama’s Justice Department has supplanted the role of Bush’s Justice Department in the case, and their position will likely inform the terms under which Rove is questioned by Congress.

Hertz’s statement mirrors a statement from Obama White House Counsel Gregory Craig published Saturday.

“The president is very sympathetic to those who want to find out what happened,”  Craig told The Washington Post. “But he is also mindful as president of the United States not to do anything that would undermine or weaken the institution of the presidency.

*emphasis added

From TimesOnline

“Since I have retired I feel more at liberty to be against certain decisions of the Government, especially the attempt to pass laws which interfere with people’s privacy…” “….It would be better that the Government recognised that there are risks, rather than frightening people in order to be able to pass laws which restrict civil liberties, which is precisely one of the objects of terrorism: that we live in fear and under a police state.”

Dame Stella Rimington, the former head of MI5

Dame Stella said that America was even more to blame and had acted as a recruiting sergeant for extremists, through harsh anti-terror measures that have been accused of breaching human rights law.

The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) found that “many states have fallen into a trap set by terrorists”, by introducing anti-terrorism measures which undermined the very values they sought to protect. Many such measures were imposed on a temporary basis but ended up becoming permanent features of law and practice, it said. It condemned the use of torture, disappearances, and arbitrary and secret detention.

More from the ICJ

“The United States, one of the world’s leading democracies, has adopted measures to counter terrorism that are inconsistent with established principles of international humanitarian law and human rights law,” said the panel in its 199-page report.

….

The report said the U.S. government applies rules of war to situations without armed conflict and that in cases of real combat it “distorts, selectively applies and ignores otherwise binding rules” of international humanitarian law, which includes the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare.

“The panel has no doubt that there is a real and substantial threat from terrorism in different parts of the world and that governments are under a duty to take effective measures to counter that threat,” the report said. “That does not mean that well-established principles of international law can or should be ignored.”

“It was particularly disturbing to learn in many hearings that governments in other parts of the world are relativizing or justifying their own wrongdoing by comparisons with the U.S.”

Yoo and Bybee are …finally…under fire. More people are speaking out as the fear of Bushco ends. The story of Gitmo guard Brandon Neely. still has the power to shock, even with all we know. And the American People are calling for investigations.

As the tyrants power fades, a great unraveling has begun. Perhaps, just perhaps, the great unraveling will lead to a full disclosure of all of the excesses of the Global War on Terra, and maybe even accountability. The first step in creating a sane world….especially as it would curtail…or perhaps even end, the power of the Right Wing to impose it’s own fantasy world over the grim realities we face. If they are revealed as the criminals that all of the evidence shows them to be….Maybe then we can finally make some Progress in addressing the challenges that face the human race in a non-insane fashion.

Cross yer fingers ….and Yell Louder!

Original article, by Paul Bond, via World Socialist Web Site:

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced Friday that no police officer would face trial for the killing of Jean Charles de Menezes. The CPS had reviewed the case following the open verdict given in December by an inquest jury, who rejected the police account of events. De Menezes’s family has announced that they will sue Scotland Yard for damages.