Libertas Continued

After the Senate passed the financial reform bill last week, the Center for Responsive Politics compared the senators' votes with their campaign funding. The results are all too familiar. Senators who opposed the legislation received 16 percent more money from the financial industry than senators who supported it. For the House version, it was even more egregious: Representatives who voted No got 70 percent more money from commercial banks than those who voted Yes. Is it a coincidence? You probably know what I think. Special interest money continues to poison our politics, creating the impression that votes in Congress are bought and sold to the highest bidder. According to the CRP, the finance, insurance, and real estate sectors -- those that would be regulated by the financial reform bill -- showered $2.3 billion onto candidates, leadership PACs, and party committees since 1989. We're going up against some deep-pocketed interests in our fight for electoral reform, b...

Bruce Dixon, of the Black Agenda Report, and a member of the Move to Amend steering committee, wants to know. As a corporation, its assets are protected and its liability is limited; but if its board, officers, or major shareholders want to throw the company’s weight behind a candidate, it has the same speech rights as a person. BP won’t be indicted for murder or even negligent homicide in the deaths of the 11 oil workers on the Deepwater rig even though, as Dixon writes, “most or all of the first wave of Gulf Coast states where the oil slick will wash all have capital punishment for people.” “Centuries ago,” Dixon writes, “most of the humans who mattered agreed that kings, queens and nobly born… had the god given right to ride roughshod over humanity.” Corporations, and those who control them, have much in common with that old-style aristocracy. How long before we come together to toss them off their thrones?

Author Ayaan Hirsi Ali talks about her new book, Infidel, and discusses her life as a fugitive, how to fight radical Islam, and the need for what she calls legitimate intolerance. As others claim to be victims of global colonialism, Ayaan takes responsibility for her world. She argues that since the end of colonial rule, many Islamic nations have turned backward, instituting slavery and female genital mutilation. Her well spoken thought and story have been an inspiration to the west, as she claims her freedoms come not from rebelling against the past mistakes of former colonial powers, but from acceptance of the liberal reforms of modern western civil rights movements.

It's been forty years since National Guard troops opened fire on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University and stunned the nation. On May 4, 1970, the students on the campus in Ohio gathered to protest the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. The Ohio National Guard, in its attempts to disperse the crowd, shot and killed four people and wounded nine others. The event deeply divided the nation both politically and culturally, and many important questions remain in regards to why the Guardsmen shot into the crowd.  Remember Kent State !

A Message to the People of the United States of America Posted by qazi@afghan-web.com the Wednesday, September 12 2001 @ 15:49:24 MEST October 8, 1998 From Ahmad Shah Massoud Defence Minister, Islamic State of Afghanistan Through the United States SenateCommittee on Foreign Relations Hearing on Events in Afghanistan In the name of God Mr. Chairman, honorable representatives of the people of the United States of America, I send this message to you today on behalf of the freedom and peace-loving people of Afghanistan, the Mujahedeen freedom fighters who resisted and defeated Soviet communism, the men and women who are still resisting oppression and foreign hegemony and, in the name of more than one and a half million Afghan martyrs who sacrificed their lives to uphold some of the same values and ideals shared by most Americans and Afghans alike. This is a crucial and unique moment in the history of Afghanistan and the world, a time when Afghanistan has crossed yet another...

The court has ruled that the FCC has no jurisdiction over the internet! Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski can simply change the FCC regulatory rules to give the Federal Communications Commission jurisdiction over the internet. People have to remember, all media—television, radio, phone service—every type of media other than the printed page, will soon be delivered by a broadband or internet connection. That means these wonky sort of arcane rules that are being played out at the Federal Communications Commission and in the court ruling yesterday, these will shape the media for generations, what it looks like, whether independent voices like Democracy Now! can get into the suite of options that people have across the country when they turn on a television. It will determine whether we can bridge the digital divide that currently has the United States slipping from fourth in the year 2000 to twenty-second in broadband adoption and speed and affordability....

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