Your bi-partisan politicians at work: floodgates to open to Wall Street misinformation

The hucksters are about to fill the airwaves with misinformation. From the New York Times:

Soon retirees and other investors will be barraged with advertisements for private stock offerings — via mail, cold calling, television, radio, billboards, the Internet and so on.Such advertising, which used to be banned under federal securities law, will make it easier for hedge funds, venture capitalists, start-ups and other nonpublic companies to find investors. It will also make it easier for hucksters and rip-off artists to lure people into unsuitable investments and outright frauds because private offerings are not subject to disclosure requirements and other investor protections that apply to publicly held companies. Bipartisan majorities in Congress and President Obama are to thank for this development. Bowing to the financial industry, they joined forces last April to pass a law that requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to lift the ban on mass advertising of private offerings.

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A few agitated thoughts about the Republican Convention

I'm really getting sick of this Republican BS. They are so incredibly ashamed of their extended recent track record that they have banished George W. Bush from the convention, lest he remind us what their program really amounts to, even though he was the President for eight fucking years of lies, waste, ignorance, secrecy, torture, naivete and corruption. Further, they banish Sarah Palin from the stage because even they know that she is a ill-informed PR craving clown. Look, I'm not a big fan of the Democrats these days either, but there is something surreal about this Republican party, a syndicate that plunges us into huge debt with their two non-ending corrupt miserable wars that have no defined objective and then they further plunge us into debt with non-stop tax cuts for the rich (and no, the war continues in Iraq--we just aren't officially there). And then they cart out a candidate who hides his money in Swiss banks after making his multi-millions by plunging vulnerable companies into massive debt using third party money. And now their plan is to have more of the same: Destroy our last functioning social institutions, redirecting those tax dollars to their uber-rich friends too and then the victims--and many of people are truly innocent victims of this insanity--will be showered with unrelenting blame. This Republican Convention is nothing but an hyper-orgy of social darwinism where the corporate media will mostly (luckily there are a few exceptions) pretend that this star-studded stunt is part of normal functioning democracy. No thanks. This is the party of Goldman Sachs--this is the party of big money in search of nothing by more money. They will NEVER have enough. What is being paraded in front of us is actually Oligarchs at Work and their followers who want to believe more than anything else that sucking the treasury dry and otherwise doing NOTHING will somehow make the nation highly functional. Doing nothing does not make for a garden--it makes for a twisted tangled jungle. THAT is the plan. In the meantime, most of those thousands of corporate media reporters in attendance have no damned idea about how to ask a meaningful question, even though 90% of those attending are one half-baked question from being exposed as fear-peddling criminals and chumps parading as paragons of morality. This is shameful, dangerous and sick. The only quick remedy I can think of for what's going on is mass derision. Those of us who are self-critical and informed need to talk up. We need to call and write and make lots of noise, in email, on websites, in newspapers, to our representatives, to our neighbors and to anyone who listens. We need to establish that the new growing trend is that we are not buying any of this. Urge your friends and family to turn off their TVs, to really get informed and join this movement.

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The media establishment’s long intense irrational hatred of Julian Assange

Glenn Greenwald, who now writes for the U.K. Guardian, sums up the media establishment's hatred of Julian Assange:

In 2008 – two years before the release of the "collateral murder" video, the Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, and the diplomatic cables – the Pentagon prepared a secret report which proclaimed WikiLeaks to be an enemy of the state and plotted ways to destroy its credibility and reputation. But in a stroke of amazing luck, Pentagon operatives never needed to do any of that, because the establishment media in the US and Britain harbor at least as much intense personal loathing for the group's founder as the US government does, and eagerly took the lead in targeting him. Many people like to posit the US national security state and western media outlets as adversarial forces, but here – as is so often the case – they have so harmoniously joined in common cause. Whatever else is true, establishment media outlets show unlimited personal animus toward the person who, as a panel of judges put it when they awarded him the the 2011 Martha Gellhorn prize for journalism, "has given the public more scoops than most journalists can imagine."

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Perpetual terrorism

Glenn Greenwald reports on a new article that explains why we will always be obsessed with terrorism:

Mueller and Stewart estimate that expenditures on domestic homeland security (i.e., not counting the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan) have increased by more than $1 trillion since 9/11, even though the annual risk of dying in a domestic terrorist attack is about 1 in 3.5 million. Using conservative assumptions and conventional risk-assessment methodology, they estimate that for these expenditures to be cost-effective “they would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 333 very large attacks that would otherwise have been successful every year.” Finally, they worry that this exaggerated sense of danger has now been “internalized”: even when politicians and “terrorism experts” aren’t hyping the danger, the public still sees the threat as large and imminent. As they conclude:
… Americans seems to have internalized their anxiety about terrorism, and politicians and policymakers have come to believe that they can defy it only at their own peril. Concern about appearing to be soft on terrorism has replaced concern about seeming to be soft on communism, a phenomenon that lasted far longer than the dramatic that generated it … This extraordinarily exaggerated and essentially delusional response may prove to be perpetual.”

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How Ayn Rand destroyed a home

Salon presents a young adult's description of how Ayn Rand destroyed her family. This vivid and intensely personal article by Alyssa Bereznak exposes the ugly underbelly of objectivism, summed up by the following words by Ayn Rand:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.
I disagree with those who believe that Rand offers a path to a meaningful life. I see life as a yin-yang dynamic, a struggle we all have trying to balance our own needs and wants with the needs of the group. [More . . . ]

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