The one thing we cannot have in our ridiculous ongoing modern prohibitionist state is a criminal justice system that punishes the criminals in law enforcement as harshly as it punishes those at whom the laws are aimed, and on whom the law principally falls. Congresscritters get nabbed with some blow and it's off to treatment. Cops skimming the profits from drug dealers -- or, even more heinous, the ones that use the preposterous civil forfeiture statutes to shop for some new wheels -- get slapped more lightly than the dealers from whom they skimmed. There is an essential corruption at the heart of the enforcement of the drug laws that rots the whole legal infrastructure of those laws from the inside...
Showing posts with label greed. Show all posts
Showing posts with label greed. Show all posts
Friday, November 22, 2013
Pierce Talks Drug War
Annie Dookhan Gets Off Easy - The Incredibly Silly "War" On "Drugs" - Esquire:
Sunday, June 16, 2013
Tax Cheaters Database
Offshore Tax-Haven Data Made Public As Companies Brace For Scrutiny:
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on Friday made public what it calls the most extensive collection of records on offshore accounts in history, encouraging sleuths to ferret out possible tax evasion.
The online portal, called the Offshore Leaks Database, contains hundreds of thousands of records showing corporations set up in so-called "tax-haven" countries, gleaned from the contents of about 2.5 million emails and financial documents that ICIJ said it received in early 2012. Over the past year, the data have been used by journalists around the world to detail alleged tax evasion by billionaires, oligarchs, emirs, princes and multinational corporations on nearly every continent...
Monday, May 20, 2013
Mouse Empire Investigates Line Cheating
Disney World Scheme: Entitled Families Hire Disabled Guide to Bypass Lines, Says Report | Parenting - Yahoo! Shine:
...Instead, according to the New York Post, the moms pay $130 an hour to hire a disabled, “black-market” guide, who uses her position—sitting in a motorized scooter—to help entitled families gain special access to rides.
“On one hand, you can say she’s a great entrepreneur,” disability activist Kleo King, of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, told Yahoo! Shine. “On the other hand, she’s kind of pimping herself out. And it’s outrageous she would help people commit fraud...”
Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Killing Through Breakfast
It's amazing. Unbelievable. No long quotes. I don't want my computer to explode. No More Free Breakfasts | National Review Online: "...These are the ways in which the Left has damaged children and families through free school breakfasts..."
Friday, April 19, 2013
Atlas Galting
James Moore: Atlas Has Shrugged: West, Texas:
...Why the obvious, even more attendant risks were ignored in West, is a more unsettling question. The state issues the permits for nursing homes and it appears there was one virtually across the street from West Fertilizer, in spite of the known dangers of the manufacture of ammonium nitrate. Not far away, a building permit was granted for a small, two story apartment complex. Is this good judgment by state and federal, and even local agencies? It's not like ammonium nitrate fertilizer hasn't been known to detonate in the past. The 1947 explosion in Texas City of a ship carrying the compound killed 500 people and remains the largest industrial disaster in American history. West happened 66 years and one day after Texas City...
Thursday, November 01, 2012
Evil Apple Flogged
UK Court Reprimands Apple over Samsung Statement - Law Blog - WSJ
A U.K. appeals court on Thursday ordered Apple Inc. AAPL +0.06% to be more sincere.
The Cupertino-based company reluctantly issued a statement on its U.K. website last week acknowledging that Samsung didn’t crib the iPad tablet design, despite Apple’s claims to the contrary. A U.K. judge had ordered the statement, in one of many legal disputes between the two tech giants over pretty much everything...
Crumbling Cell Service
Life in post apocalyptic NJ: gougers and bipartisan bullshit « The Confluence
...In this emergency when we don’t know what’s going on or whether to boil our water or not or where we can get cheap firewood, the idea that AT&T is still putting artificial limits on the data plans is outrageous. Not only that but from what I heard in WNYC last night, back in 2008 after another cellular network failure in the aftermath of a catastrophe, there was a bill pending in Congress that would have mandated that the cell towers have an 8 hour back up generator plan and the telecoms killed that bill. Yep, they killed it. This is when many people such as myself have ,given up our landlines so the only way we can call first responders after and emergency is by using our cell phones and the immoral bastards killed the bill with their army of lobbyists...
Friday, October 26, 2012
Gutting Medicaid
Study: GOP Plan Cuts Medicaid Rolls in Half
The plan offered by the Republican presidential ticket to turn Medicaid into a block grant program run by the states would cut enrollment in half, a study found.
Between repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and its Medicaid expansion and moving to a block grant program, the plan proposed by GOP vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) would cut enrollment between 31.3 million and 37.5 million, an analysis by the left-leaning Urban Institute found...
Wednesday, September 05, 2012
Tuesday, September 04, 2012
Corporate Welfare Costs
About $59 billion is spent on traditional social welfare programs. $92 billion is spent on corporate subsidies. So, the government spent 50% more on corporate welfare than it did on food stamps and housing assistance in 2006...
Monday, September 03, 2012
The Daily Flashback: Good Business Edition
Henry Ford, When Capitalists Cared - NYTimes.com
...Today, we are all paying the price for this shift. As Ford recognized, if average Americans do not have secure jobs with steady and rising pay, the economy will be sluggish. Since the early 1990s, we have been mired three times in “jobless recoveries.” It’s time for America’s business elites to step beyond political rhetoric about protecting wealthy “job creators” and grasp Ford’s insight: Give the middle class a better share of the nation’s economic gains, and the economy will grow faster. Our history shows that.
Friday, August 31, 2012
Evil Apple Loses In Japan
Samsung trumps Apple in Tokyo court - FT.com
A week after Samsung lost its US smartphone patent case, a judge in Tokyo rejected a separate attempt by Apple to assert its intellectual property against the South Korean group in Japan.
The judge ruled on Friday that Samsung had not violated Apple patents by copying a feature of the US group’s iPhone and iPad mobile devices that allows them to synchronise music and video files with computers...
Friday, August 24, 2012
A Walk On Evil (Wall) Street
The Ring of Gyges or Why Study the Classics at UVA or Why anti-Regulators are full of $#*! « The Confluence
...It’s the right that relies on religion to keep everyone in line with threats of hellfire if you’re sexually active and not married. You can always count on the religious to condemn everyone who doesn’t believe strictly in the Judeo-Christian version of the ten commandments. They have a holy fit if you’re an atheist. But they seem to be perfectly Ok with giving Wall Street a pass. It’s like, “there’s nothing we can do. They’re evil and we’re scared of them because they have all the power to make our lives miserable.” Bullshit, of course there’s something you can do. Stop voting for the politicians who keep asking for fewer regulations. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. Unfortunately, they’re also the politicians who hide behind religion or pander to religious people. Show me a religious politician and I’ll show you someone who doesn’t believe in regulation. That’s all there is to it. They want to let the criminals operate without boundaries.
If these wealthy, unaccountable assholes continue to do what they’re doing without oversight, they’re going to bring the entire world’s financial system down. That’s what happens when you can’t stop yourself from taking whatever you want and no one else has to power to interfere.
It doesn’t matter if you are on the right or the left, everything you own, everything you planned, your health, your retirement, your entire future, is at risk.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Bribing Congress
the daily howler: Brainwash si, skinny-dip no!
...Forget your particular view of AIPAC. You may agree with their policy views. You may think they too are all wet.
Forget whether AIPAC is right or wrong; this isn’t all about AIPAC. In those passages, Sherman was describing an obvious form of bribery, in which a private entity spends oodles of money on members of Congress and their grasping families.Other entities run junkets too. But in this particular instance, AIPAC was spending giant sums to brainwash members of Congress. (If we may use the old George Romney term.) Sherman was describing obvious bribery. But the point which has caused the concern is the lack of one congressman’s swim suit!...
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
The Real Bain
Bain Closes U.S. Plant, Forces Workers to Train Chinese Replacements - DailyFinance
...In the most recent news in that vein, The Guardian reports that Bain has for months been dismantling and shipping to China, "piece by piece," a car parts plant, of which it is majority owner, in Freeport, Ill. -- even as it requires the workers to train personally their Chinese replacements, who have been flown in by management.
"It's not easy to get up in the morning, training them to do your job so that you can be made unemployed," Bonnie Borman told the paper. Borman, 52, has worked at the Sensata auto sensors plant for 23 years. She has three children and predicts that soon, "I am going to be competing for minimum wage jobs with my own daughter..."
Friday, August 17, 2012
Mitt's Taxes
Mitt Romney says he pays 13 percent in taxes. How low is that? - CSMonitor.com
...In total, Romney paid $29,000 out of $20.7 million in income in 2010 for Medicare and Social Security...
UnPatriotic Businesses
Subsidizing the CEOs - Truthdig
Twenty-six of the nation’s largest corporations paid their CEOs more than they spent on taxes in 2011, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
“Our nation’s tax code has become a powerful enabler of bloated CEO pay,” says the report, which documents how American tax dollars have been diverted from public services to the accounts of executives at the nation’s biggest banks and corporations.
Americans are subsidizing CEO paychecks at a time when budget cuts have cost people 627,000 public service jobs since June 2009...
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Americans Are Compassionate
Hullabaloo: "The Dystopian Hellscape Budget isn't popular"
...This result does my heart good to tell you the truth. If you listen to Villagers, the American people are a bunch of selfish pigs who refuse to sacrifice. (These are all millionaire celebrities who won't have to go through other people's garbage to collect cans when their social security fails to buy them enough food to eat, but somehow they feel qualified to scold the rest of us about ourselfishness.) It's very reassuring to hear that most Americans still care about children and the elderly and other vulnerable citizens.
This genuinely surprised me, I must say:
Even conservatives were swayed, shifting a net 13 points toward Obama.Ayn Rand hasn't won this thing yet. If someone, anyone, makes the case for decency, compassion, empathy and the common good, apparently there are enough decent people left in this country who are ready and willing to hear it. The question is whether the Democrats are so far gone they've lost the vocabulary to talk about it....
Monday, August 13, 2012
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