Tag: Mitt Romney

Co-authored with Alexander Astin and Parker J, Palmer

You’ve heard it again and again. “My vote doesn’t matter,” students too often say. Others complain that politicians are “all the same and all corrupt.” How do we overcome this cynical resignation and encourage students to register and vote despite their conviction that the game is fundamentally rigged?

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The Romney/Ryan campaign continues to implode. A video has emerged from a private fund raiser in Boca Raton, Florida where GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney let his benefactors know how he really feels about half the country. At first the videos were dismissed as bogus, doctored works that appeared on a bogus You Tube account by someone claiming to be MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. But after the “owner” of the video contacted David Corn at Mother Jones the authenticity of the hour long diatribe against the 47% of voters was confirmed as very real. The Romney campaign is not denying the accuracy of the video. Here is the unedited full speech with transcript. Please read David Corn’s commentary about each segment,

The home where this fund raiser was held is owned by private equity manager Marc Leder who likes sex parties. So much for those family values.

And this is where the 47% live:

h/t watertiger @ Dependable Renegade

After Mr. Romney comments chastising President Obama while our embassies were under attack and four of our foreign service personnel were killed, he and his vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan continue on the low road. The debates should be very interesting. The first debate is October 3.

John Lennon . . .

I’m sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites. All I want is the truth.  Just gimme some truth.

Politicians don’t tell us the truth, the conventions are meaningless, the political system is rigged, the government, the economy, and the media are controlled by uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites.  They have immense power and material wealth, they all have a very high opinion of themselves, but one artist with a conscience and the truth is worth more to humanity than every politician, banker, and businessman who ever lived.

John Lennon had a conscience, he told the truth, about himself, about society, about politics, about what matters and what doesn’t.

Why in the world are we here?

Surely not to live in pain and fear.

We have to shine on, no matter what. We have to shine on because the night has come and the land is dark.  We have to stand by each other, we have to pick each other up when we fall.  That’s not socialism, it’s not Marxism, it’s not entitlement fever, it’s why we’re here.  Making money isn’t what life’s about, seeking power over others isn’t what life’s about, helping each other is what life’s about.    

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

We know that the Obama administration was determined to never prosecute any of the main architects of the Bush regime torture program, or close Guantanamo. Last week while everyone was focused on the Republican Party Convention in Tampa, the Department of Justice announced that it is formally ending its investigation of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program with out bringing criminal charges:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Mr. Holder had stated that the DOJ would not charge any of the interrogators if they had acted strictly in accordance with the department’s legal advice. Thus giving legitimacy to the “we were just following orders” defense that was rejected when used by German war criminals at Nuremberg. Mr. Holder just thumbed his nose at established international law, as well.

The lame excuse that there is a lack of solid evidence is just ludicrous, as David Dayen wrote in his article at FDL News Desk:

This was the investigation headed by John Durham, the federal prosecutor selected in August 2009 to look into charges of torture in CIA interrogations during the Bush Administration. We know plenty about those charges. The Justice Department released a previously classified document around the same time that they named Durham to lead the investigation, detailing the methods they used to interrogate suspects, including plenty of metMr. Obamahods that a plain reading would consider to be torture. This included waterboarding, stress positions, mock executions, threatening with handguns and power drills, vowing to kill or rape members of a detainee’s family, and inducing vomiting. [..]

In July 2010, federal judge and former Bush-era Justice Department official Jay Bybee, who wrote many of the Administration’s guidelines on interrogation, admitted to a House committee that CIA personnel never asked for approval for many of the interrogation techniques they used, that they went further than the prescribed guidelines from him, and that the ones he did prescribe were used excessively. Even if you believe that Bybee’s techniques were legal and did not violate federal and international conventions against torture, his testimony revealed clearly that CIA interrogators broke the law. Despite this prima facie evidence of unauthorized interrogation, the investigation went nowhere.

From the very start of his administration Pres. Obama and his officials have shielded the Bush torturers from all accountability, despite his campaign promise to have his Justice Department thoroughly investigate any charge of torture because no one is above the law. Then, even before he was inaugurated Mr. Obama declared that he was apposed to any of these investigations declaring  “we must look forward, not backward.”

Glenn Greenwald writing for The Guardian, reviews the timeline of decisions that has lead to a whitewash of the “war on terror crimes.”

Throughout the first several months of his presidency, his top political aides, such as the chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel and his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, publicly – and inappropriately – pressured the justice department to refrain from any criminal investigations. Over and over, they repeated the Orwellian mantra that such investigations were objectionable because “we must look forward, not backward“. As Gibbs put it in April 2009, when asked to explain Obama’s opposition, “the president is focused on looking forward. That’s why.”

On 16 April 2009, Obama himself took the first step in formalizing the full-scale immunity he intended to bestow on all government officials involved even in the most heinous and lethal torture. On that date, he decreed absolute immunity for any official involved in torture provided that it comported with the permission slips produced by Bush department of justice (DOJ) lawyers which authorized certain techniques. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” the new president so movingly observed in his statement announcing this immunity. Obama added:

   “[N]othing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past … we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.” [..]

(I)n August 2009, Holder announced a formal investigation to determine whether criminal charges should be brought in over 100 cases of severe detainee abuse involving “off-the-books methods” such as “mock execution and threatening a prisoner with a gun and a power drill”, as well as threats that “prisoners (would be) made to witness the sexual abuse of their relatives.” But less than two years later, on 30 June 2011, Holder announced that of the more than 100 cases the justice department had reviewed, there would be no charges brought in any of them – except two.

Glenn goes on to discuss the evidence in those two brutal cases that the justice department has now closed without charges and how the Obama administration even shut down investigations by Spain and Germany:

Moreover, Obama’s top officials, as WikiLeaks cables revealed, secretly worked with GOP operatives to coerce other countries, such as Spain and Germany, to quash their investigations into the US torture of their citizens, and issued extraordinary threats to prevent British courts from disclosing any of what was done. And probably worst of all, the Obama administration aggressively shielded Bush officials even from being held accountable in civil cases brought by torture victims, by invoking radical secrecy powers and immunity doctrines to prevent courts even from hearing those claims.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration has prosecuted whistleblowers with a vigor that has surpassed all other presidents. In the NY Times article, Mr Holder noted one case in his announcement:

While no one has been prosecuted for the harsh interrogations, a former C.I.A. officer who helped hunt members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan and later spoke publicly about waterboarding, John C. Kiriakou, is awaiting trial on criminal charges that he disclosed to journalists the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.

Glenn appeared on Democracy Now with host Amy Goodman to discuss Mr. Holder’s announcement. During the seven minute interview they also discussed Clint Eastwood’s conversation with an empty chair at the RNC Convention,

Mr. Holder covers up the evidence, allows the real criminals to walk, instead prosecuting those who spoke out about the crimes.

Is this the change we are suppose to believe in and vote to reelect?  

Searching high . . .

Tampa expected 15,000 protesters for the Republican National Convention. So far, the city has seen no more than “a couple thousand,” Tampa Police Chief Jane Castor told reporters this morning.  “There aren’t nearly the number of demonstrators we expected,” Castor said.  One reason could be Hurricane Isaac, which forced some bus companies to cancel planned charters of protesters into Tampa Bay..

Searching low . . .

How little impact are the protests at the Republican convention making?  Well, let’s put it this way, yesterday the Tampa chief of police cancelled a scheduled afternoon press conference because there wasn’t enough to report. The Examiner reported Monday that the crowds were sparse at the protests and they haven’t gotten any larger since then. Reportedly, the largest crowd at any protest was 300 people at one at Ybor City, which is about three miles from the convention center.

Searching everywhere they know . . .

There were several protests Wednesday, but none of them were what city officials had feared.  The largest was sponsored by Planned Parenthood at Julian Lane Park about a mile north of the Tampa Bay Times Forum.  It featured speeches and chants like ” Ho ho, hey hey, Planned Parenthood is here to stay.”

At midday, there was a protest at speech featuring former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.  During the speech when Rice was talking about the compassionate Bush administration, a Code Pink protester, former Army Colonel Ann Wright, stood up and said, “You can’t be compassionate and kill people!” However, no one was arrested and for the most part, everything has been extremely calm.

Asking the cops wherever they go . . .

Have you seen dignity?

It’s hard to say where it went wrong,

Decades before me and this song,

Through the banksters and the wars,

I just can’t take it anymore . . .

As the leaders of the People’s Republic of Plutocracy, Inc. prepare for the corporate coronations of Romney and Obama in Tampa and Charlotte, they’re fervently hoping Occupy Wall Street won’t spoil all the fun by sending dangerous American citizens into the streets to tell the truth all over the place.  In Beltway offices, Homeland Security meetings, and conference calls with the militarized police departments of the One-Percent, the same questions are being asked about Occupy Wall Street. Who are those people?  Why are they going to the national conventions with protest signs and devious plans to say whatever they want about the government, right out loud, in broad daylight where other citizens might hear them?  What the hell do they think this is, a democracy?  

I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to matter how many riot police are in the streets, pepper-spraying everyone in the twilight’s last gleaming, Americans are going to hear what Occupy Wall Street has to say in Tampa and Charlotte about the “government” and the “job creators” and this trickle down train wreck they call an economy.

Oh yeah . . .

Oh please believe me, I’d hate to miss the train.  Oh yeah.

The chorus of our new national anthem is inspiring, isn’t it?  Feel free to sing along Fox viewers, low information voters, brainwashed birthers and cable pundits, pulpit pounders of the Westboro Baptist Church and Obamabots of the Great Orange Asteroid . . .  

Every worker had a hard year,

Every banker had a good time,

Every general had a wet dream,

Every fat cat saw the sun shine.

Oh yeah.

There’s room at the top they are telling you still,

But first you must learn how to smile as you kill.

The more you smile as you kill, the higher you go. In American politics. In American banking. In American business.  All of those smiling killers have been smiling even more in 2012, because they think the Occupy Movement is dying.  Dying like democracy is, dying like equality is, as dying like justice is.

William Rivers Pitt . . .

We are told that the Occupy movement is over, finished, and irrelevant, but I strongly disagree. It is relevant because it happened: the passion required to bring needed change to this nation is out there, all around you, and the evidence of that was there for all to see last year. That passion, that desire, and those numbers are still there, multiplying and gathering strength for the struggles to come.

Occupy, like all the other great movements in American history, is passing through its infancy. The civil rights struggle was an afterthought in the 1950’s and early 1960’s, until the slow and steady groundswell of popular support delivered the Civil Rights Act and the end of legalized Jim Crow racism in America. The anti-war movement was barely a blip on the screen of popular consciousness for many, many years, until it exploded everywhere, ended a war, and took down a president.

Occupy’s infancy will end, and when it does, we will be participants in and witnesses to another moment in history, a moment when the righteous tide will wash in and sweep away the filth that pollutes us as a people and a country.

The likely Republican presidential candidate and quintessential vulture capitalist, Mitt Romney, chided President Obama for not being sufficiently fearful of Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chávez Friás last week.  In the conservative Daily Telegraph Mitt is quoted as saying:

“The idea that this nation, this president, doesn’t pose a national security threat is simply naive and an extraordinary admission on the part of this president to be completely out of touch with what is happening in Latin America,” Romney said of Chavez in an  interview Wednesday with Fox News.

.

Yes, socialist Venezuela, the country which was recently ranked the 5th happiest in the world, following four social democratic countries, presents a threat to Mitt’s vulture business model and his support base, who largely come from the 92,000 wealthy individuals who sequester their wealth in “tax havens” such as Switzerland the Cayman Islands. (See rt. com  for its report on “The Price of Off Shore Revisited”.

After President Chavez was elected to office in 1998, Venezuela has had currency controls in place to prevent its national wealth from being looted and sent to extra-territorial banks, a model which defeats the efforts of would-be off shore tax evaders in Venezuela.  Other countries have allowed themselves to be systematically raped of their needed tax revenues.

Venezuela also jailed its criminal banksters for speculating with their depositors money.  Here, Mitt, you would likely be in jail for creating tax-evading investment vehicles in the Cayman Islands.  No, socialist Venezuela, under President Chavez, is definitely not a vulture-capitalist friendly country.  That is why it is now thriving.

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Mitt Romney made his wealth an issue of the campaign when he touted his business acumen as head of Bain Capital where he made most of his fortune. Romney has already said that he will not release anymore returns than his 2010 tax return and an estimate for 2011. In a lame defense of this refusal, Romney has said that, “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” claiming that the problem is not him but the tax laws. But you know you have problems when you have neo-conservatives like Bill Kristol and George Will along with 18 other prominent Republicans, telling you to release the returns. Nope, Mitt is sticking with his story and sent the missus out to put her foot in her mouth down:

Mitt Romney’s wife is reinforcing her husband’s refusal to make public several years of tax returns, saying “we’ve given all you people need to know” about the family’s finances.

“You people”? A bit condescending there, Annie.

Mitt made this an issue as Eugene Robinson notes that it just makes it all that much more suspicious:

Mitt Romney has every right to cloak his personal and professional finances in secrecy-and voters have every right to assume he has something embarrassing to hide. If this seems unfair, Romney has only himself to blame. [..]

Romney has spent the better part of a decade running for president. Did it never occur to him that if he ever won the Republican nomination, surely there would come a time when he was under pressure to release multiple years’ worth of tax returns? Did he think everyone would forget that it was his own father, George Romney, who set the modern standard for financial disclosure? Did he not recall that when he was being considered for the vice presidential nod four years ago, he furnished tax returns spanning more than two decades to the John McCain campaign?

Clearly he knew the subject would come up. The only reasonable conclusion to draw is that Romney believes that while stonewalling on his taxes may cost him some support, releasing them would cost him more.

Jon Stewart added his analysis of “The Romney Returns”

Mitt Romney has not released a single year of his full taxes. We want to know what is he hiding, join us in demanding he release his full tax returns at www.whatishehiding.com.

He has released part of his 2010 returns but omitted to release the IRS documents on his vast cash hoards sitting in offshore accounts.

According to reporting by the Huffington Post,

Tax experts say it is almost certain that Romney did file the form, known as a Report on Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, or “FBAR” in accountant slang. The penalty for not filing an FBAR can be severe, and the IRS would have expected to receive the form since Romney listed the Swiss bank account on his tax return. Listing the account on his tax return and then failing to file the subsequent FBAR would have been asking for a hefty fine, and would probably have heightened IRS scrutiny of prior tax filings.

Nevertheless, Romney’s omission of the form from the earlier disclosure raises questions for tax policy experts about the function of his Swiss bank account, and whether or not Romney used other offshore bank accounts that did not generate interest.

“The campaign has never told us why he had a Swiss bank account,” said Rebecca Wilkins, senior counsel for federal tax policy at Citizens for Tax Justice, a nonprofit tax reform group. “It just looks bad.”

For individuals seeking to game the U.S. tax code, Swiss bank accounts are only useful when used illegally. Swiss accounts are prized by global elites for their extreme levels of secrecy. That secrecy has allowed thousands of American taxpayers to stash income from offshore companies in a Swiss account, shielding it from the IRS.

The question is What Is He Hiding?

Please take a minute and add your voice to the growing call for Mitt Romney to release his full tax returns and reveal to the American people what he has been hiding, go to www.whatishehiding.com.

America has never been this fucked up.

That bitter awareness is echoing from one end of reality to the other, it’s rumbling just under the surface of this Wonderland of the One-Percent, it can be heard in the whistling of Wall Street bankers past the graveyard of the economy, in the silence of a million foreclosed homes, in the blowing of the wind through the ragged lines of the unemployed, in the pounding of the waves of karma on the shores of capitalism, where the sandcastles of the American Dream are being swept away, where the piers of the political system are collapsing into the sea, where a long night is falling and the lights along the boardwalk of forgotten freedom are all going out.