That's because you're using the wrong definition of "terror organizations". You're probably thinking it means "people who target and kill large numbers of civilians, typically in order to push a geopolitical agenda".
But the definition of "terror organizations" used by major news outlets, including the New York Times, is "People who use violence to oppose the United States and/or Israel". That, by definition, means the US can't support terror organizations. Also, note that the same organization that were "freedom fighters" becomes a "terror organization" as soon as they switch from fighting the USSR to fighting the US.
I'm holding both Bush and Obama responsible, although as a sibling pointed out it's been arguably a problem for much longer than that.
Under the Bush administration, a program called Total Information Awareness was launched to intercept and store all Internet traffic without even the pretense of getting a warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. This was too much even for Congress, so they defunded the project. The Bush administration just renamed the subprojects or moved them to other offices, and then pushed through a law granting immunity to AT&T for cooperating with this to stop the pending lawsuit challenging the program. Obama has continued the program and shows no sign of ending it.
The TSA regularly harasses people for being part of groups like the ACLU (in violation of the First Amendment), or involved in Bradley Manning's defense (in violation of the Sixth Amendment). This started back in 2002 or so, and has continued to the present day.
In September 2001, John Ashcroft's Department of Justice rounded up several thousand people, without charges, on the grounds that they were material witnesses. Many of these people ended up in Gitmo, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. 10 years later, after several changes of Congress and a change of administration, some of those people are still in Gitmo, in violation of the Sixth Amendment.
While technically the Executive has no power, if the Obama administration really cared they would call up their pals in the House and say "We need a bill that does XYZ" or even "This is a bill we'd like to see pass. Introduce it please." It's technically correct to say bills originate in the House or Senate, but in practice the President can most definitely push a particular plan through Congress.
This is a common fallacy. When the cost of producing a typical widget goes up (for whatever reason, be it labor, materials, taxes), it most definitely does affect whoever owns the widget producers.
Assume a widget producer selling U widgets for a price X, making net revenues P of (X - C) * U. If C goes up by some value c, that obviously changes things to P = (X - C - c) * U. If the producer passes the entire cost along to the consumer, attempting to make P = (X + c - C - c) * U = (X-C)*U again, the Law of Demand states that higher prices means fewer people buy something, so U will drop by some number u, so P = (X-C) * (U-u), which lowers P again.
There are several arguments in favor of the unelected bureaucrats making those sorts of decisions: - Congress only has so much time available, so that means that fewer decisions can get made. If, for example, you had to get a bill passed every time you wanted to figure out whether a new mining technique was a good idea, it would make the technological development of the field much slower, and fetter the market even more than unelected bureaucrats do.
- Congressmen aren't experts in a particular field. Using our mining example again, chances are very good that not one of the congressmen on the committee that handles mining issues knows a darn thing about mine engineering, the environmental impacts, the health costs, or the economic drawbacks and benefits. They can call as witnesses experts in those fields, of course, but they will likely end up in the situation where expert A says we should regulate while expert B says we shouldn't, and Congress is no more enlightened than they were before the hearings.
- Congressmen have to worry about being reelected. That means they will have a lots of difficulty making decisions that are unpopular (especially among campaign donors) but scientifically correct. For instance, a bureaucrat might say "You can't build that kind of mine here because it puts too much mercury in the water supply of a major city." That decision will cost jobs, and thus likely be unpopular, but at the same time may be correct, because the excess mercury will cost way more in medical problems than the mine can bring in as investment.
- Laws trump regulation, so if Congress cares to overturn a regulation they can do so.
Pretend for the moment that Microsoft has found a way of storing data that completely does away with the directory tree and file concept that have been a basic piece of operating system design since the 1970's. Now, to make Windows do that would require major changes and break backwards compatibility, so why would they possibly want that?
Well, imagine another family of operating systems had made files the key component of what they do, so much so that it makes practically everything look like a file, whether a network socket or a hardware device. It's even gone the extra mile on compatibility to support using a wide variety of other OS's file systems, including Windows' preferred file system, so that those who want to run multiple OS's on the same machine can do so relatively painlessly.
Now imagine that Microsoft wants to break that compatibility in an attempt to maintain its market position. Now, they're first try (which is a lot cheaper) is to occasionally redesign their filesystem so that the other family of operating systems has to adjust their compatibility layers. But those jerks seem to be keeping up with you, reverse-engineering what you did. So now, to really break compatibility, you have to go after the concept of having a file system, so that instead of something coherent that the other OS can build a driver for, you need special proprietary code to turn the gobbledygook on disk into something a user can read.
Of course, the only part of this that's really imaginary is that last bit. But my guess is that what they're aiming for is "Want to read data from a Windows machine? You need a copy of a certain Windows DLL running, which will only run on Windows."
Do people really have that much of an issue with their own negotiation?... Is US employment culture that different to British employment culture?
I'm not sure about US employment culture, but US labour law is dramatically different from UK labour law. Some important differences: 1. The UK requires employers to give significant paid time off, amounting to 28 days according to Wikipedia (for whatever that's worth) 2. The UK's minimum wage is approximately 50% higher than the US once you factor in the exchange rates. 3. The UK has an maximum required overtime of 48 hours per week. 4. The UK has a lot of restrictions on how you can sack somebody, including notice, a stated reason after 1 year, and an extra payment after 2 years. 5. Not directly part of labour law, but the UK has the National Health Service, so losing one's job doesn't mean losing access to medical care.
This makes a big difference: The US minimum wage is not enough to live on in many areas, many employers give no time off at all, some regularly demand a 60 hour work week, and the normal way to sack someone in the US is for someone to show up at work and get told to clean out their desk (followed by being escorted out of the building by company security). Unionized employees, on the other hand, have a much better chance of getting those kind of benefits.
Regardless of whether "most people" even know this exists, recent polling has about 50% of the public supporting legalization of pot. So yes, legalization is something people want to see changed.
As to whether it affects "most people", a large percentage of adults admit to using pot, which means that practically everybody knows somebody who either uses pot or used pot in the past. Now, it affects non-white people a lot more than white people because the cops bust non-white people a lot more than they bust white people, but it's really an issue that affects the majority of Americans.
Watch me substitute 1 word and make your argument so obviously ridiculous for anyone who knows anything about US history:
Sorry, but if you think making alcohol legal will stop organized crime in any way, you're mistaken. They'll continue to rake in money for pills, cocaine, opiates, underage girls, etc. They would likely even become more violent to protect those remaining assets after losing their alcohol income.
And if you think an alcohol tax is going to raise significant revenue, you're also mistaken. Especially when the market for illegal alcohol exists, with no taxes, and everyone who drinks it already knows where to get it that way. The criminal alcohol element will always exist. It even still exists with cigarettes. People try to skirt taxes on everything all the time, buying across state borders or making their own.
The irony is that the same people who yell for alcohol taxation would be much of the same hypocrites still buying it on street corners to save a buck.
Gitmo is open because the Republicans made it impossible to transfer the detainees out.
First off, they're prisoners, not "detainees". I know that's what the US government has been calling them, but when you lock somebody up for years on end, subjecting them to ruthless interrogations and torture (according to everybody's definition of torture except the US government's post-2001), you aren't just detaining them, you're imprisoning them. The meaning of the word "detained" in criminal law is that an officer has required a citizen to stay where they are temporarily (e.g. you can't legally drive off during a traffic stop) which requires the officer only to have a reasonable suspicion.
Second, if Obama was serious about closing down Gitmo, and the Republicans stopped him, here's what he could have said, publicly: "The United States Constitution, which I am bound by law and by oath to uphold, requires me to give everyone a speedy and public trial. The Republicans have prevented me from giving them a public trial. Therefor, I have no choice but to release all prisoners remaining at Gitmo, returning them to their homes." That's not politically convenient, but that is legally what he's supposed to be doing.
The purpose of making marijuana illegal was never "It's a highly dangerous drug." It actually was all about racial fears - to quote from the guy who first pushed for marijuana illegal back in 1937, Harry J Anslinger:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others." "Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy" "Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis."
Similarly, the very first anti-drug laws were aimed at going after Chinese opium dens.
The point at which a different sort of revolution is a viable option is when the rank-and-file military decide to protect the citizens from their government. That's part of what happened in 1775 - the militias and the like were in theory part of the British military. It's what happened in Egypt - when Mubarak sent in the army to try to regain control of Cairo, the army decided to protect the protesters from the police. Probably relevant here is that a significant number of Occupy protesters are either military on leave or recently discharged veterans (including Scott Olsen, severely injured by police in Oakland).
Write PAPER letters to your state and national Representatives and Senators (and mayors and governors). Tell them that you want them to OPPOSE this.
That's not going to work, unless your paper letters include large campaign checks. That's the problem: Your elected representatives don't give a damn what you think, because they know that the opposing party's candidate won't attack them for supporting counter-terrorism efforts.
If you really want to do something, find your local Occupy protest and see what kind of help they need to make it through the winter.
It should be noted that that part of thing isn't going to plan: A number of returning US Marines have volunteered to help protect Occupy protesters from the police.
As someone who loves beer, I have to say that mead is also fantastic - Vikings were convinced to go to war by being bribed with the stuff, which should tell you how awesome it is.
Let's just say there's a lot of benefits to being or befriending good brewers.
That's nothing: I took the train from Cleveland to San Diego (2.5 days) for much the same reason. I had the time and the money to stand up for civil liberties, so I decided to walk the walk.
The next step, of course, is to set up similar random checkpoints on highways to try to prevent people from getting around the searches by driving themselves. And then to set up checkpoints on smaller roads because the terrorists could use them to get around the highway checkpoints. Yes, I realize it's a slippery slope argument, but each slide down the slope seems very possible.
I know rules can be bend, and even dodge, etc, so what kind of strategy is being used to keep on doing something illegal to the people of the USA without receiving any consequences?
It's very simple, really: Although there have been rumblings about this sort of thing going back at least as far as Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, the various top political elites have an unwritten but very real agreement to never prosecute each other no matter how heinous the crime. They've also generally had agreement to protect their top financial contributors, which is why practically no executives are in jail for fraud regarding worthless mortgage-backed securities.
Here's where the flaws appear to be: 1. The politically appointed (or in some cases elected) prosecutors can choose whether or not to zealously prosecute a defendant regardless of the strength of the evidence against that defendant. So when Lloyd Blankfein commits fraud on a massive scale, but contributes to the president's campaign, the president tells the AG to tell the US attorneys to ignore any evidence of his crimes. 2. In states with elected judges, it's not uncommon for judges to trade favorable decisions for campaign contributions. 3. And of course, if all else fails and somebody is convicted of a crime, elected leaders can override court decisions with pardons and commutation (e.g. Scooter Libbey).
The trouble is, there's no obvious solution to any of these. Forcing prosecutors to do their jobs won't work because they're the ones responsible for enforcing the rule that says they have to do their job. Appointing judges won't completely work because you'll just get the governor's or the president's cronies. And there's really no way to stop a president from letting somebody go even if they've been convicted of a crime.
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Funny you brought up Al Qaida, because back in the 1980's, Osama bin Laden was one of the good guys bravely fighting the Russians.
That's because you're using the wrong definition of "terror organizations". You're probably thinking it means "people who target and kill large numbers of civilians, typically in order to push a geopolitical agenda".
But the definition of "terror organizations" used by major news outlets, including the New York Times, is "People who use violence to oppose the United States and/or Israel". That, by definition, means the US can't support terror organizations. Also, note that the same organization that were "freedom fighters" becomes a "terror organization" as soon as they switch from fighting the USSR to fighting the US.
I'm holding both Bush and Obama responsible, although as a sibling pointed out it's been arguably a problem for much longer than that.
Under the Bush administration, a program called Total Information Awareness was launched to intercept and store all Internet traffic without even the pretense of getting a warrant, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. This was too much even for Congress, so they defunded the project. The Bush administration just renamed the subprojects or moved them to other offices, and then pushed through a law granting immunity to AT&T for cooperating with this to stop the pending lawsuit challenging the program. Obama has continued the program and shows no sign of ending it.
The TSA regularly harasses people for being part of groups like the ACLU (in violation of the First Amendment), or involved in Bradley Manning's defense (in violation of the Sixth Amendment). This started back in 2002 or so, and has continued to the present day.
In September 2001, John Ashcroft's Department of Justice rounded up several thousand people, without charges, on the grounds that they were material witnesses. Many of these people ended up in Gitmo, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. 10 years later, after several changes of Congress and a change of administration, some of those people are still in Gitmo, in violation of the Sixth Amendment.
While technically the Executive has no power, if the Obama administration really cared they would call up their pals in the House and say "We need a bill that does XYZ" or even "This is a bill we'd like to see pass. Introduce it please." It's technically correct to say bills originate in the House or Senate, but in practice the President can most definitely push a particular plan through Congress.
This is a common fallacy. When the cost of producing a typical widget goes up (for whatever reason, be it labor, materials, taxes), it most definitely does affect whoever owns the widget producers.
Assume a widget producer selling U widgets for a price X, making net revenues P of (X - C) * U. If C goes up by some value c, that obviously changes things to P = (X - C - c) * U. If the producer passes the entire cost along to the consumer, attempting to make P = (X + c - C - c) * U = (X-C)*U again, the Law of Demand states that higher prices means fewer people buy something, so U will drop by some number u, so P = (X-C) * (U-u), which lowers P again.
There are several arguments in favor of the unelected bureaucrats making those sorts of decisions:
- Congress only has so much time available, so that means that fewer decisions can get made. If, for example, you had to get a bill passed every time you wanted to figure out whether a new mining technique was a good idea, it would make the technological development of the field much slower, and fetter the market even more than unelected bureaucrats do.
- Congressmen aren't experts in a particular field. Using our mining example again, chances are very good that not one of the congressmen on the committee that handles mining issues knows a darn thing about mine engineering, the environmental impacts, the health costs, or the economic drawbacks and benefits. They can call as witnesses experts in those fields, of course, but they will likely end up in the situation where expert A says we should regulate while expert B says we shouldn't, and Congress is no more enlightened than they were before the hearings.
- Congressmen have to worry about being reelected. That means they will have a lots of difficulty making decisions that are unpopular (especially among campaign donors) but scientifically correct. For instance, a bureaucrat might say "You can't build that kind of mine here because it puts too much mercury in the water supply of a major city." That decision will cost jobs, and thus likely be unpopular, but at the same time may be correct, because the excess mercury will cost way more in medical problems than the mine can bring in as investment.
- Laws trump regulation, so if Congress cares to overturn a regulation they can do so.
The US executive branch has been in blatant violation of the highest law of the land for over a decade now, why would they stop now?
Am I the only one who was thinking this post was going to be about giving Richard Stallman a makeover?
Pretend for the moment that Microsoft has found a way of storing data that completely does away with the directory tree and file concept that have been a basic piece of operating system design since the 1970's. Now, to make Windows do that would require major changes and break backwards compatibility, so why would they possibly want that?
Well, imagine another family of operating systems had made files the key component of what they do, so much so that it makes practically everything look like a file, whether a network socket or a hardware device. It's even gone the extra mile on compatibility to support using a wide variety of other OS's file systems, including Windows' preferred file system, so that those who want to run multiple OS's on the same machine can do so relatively painlessly.
Now imagine that Microsoft wants to break that compatibility in an attempt to maintain its market position. Now, they're first try (which is a lot cheaper) is to occasionally redesign their filesystem so that the other family of operating systems has to adjust their compatibility layers. But those jerks seem to be keeping up with you, reverse-engineering what you did. So now, to really break compatibility, you have to go after the concept of having a file system, so that instead of something coherent that the other OS can build a driver for, you need special proprietary code to turn the gobbledygook on disk into something a user can read.
Of course, the only part of this that's really imaginary is that last bit. But my guess is that what they're aiming for is "Want to read data from a Windows machine? You need a copy of a certain Windows DLL running, which will only run on Windows."
Do people really have that much of an issue with their own negotiation? ... Is US employment culture that different to British employment culture?
I'm not sure about US employment culture, but US labour law is dramatically different from UK labour law. Some important differences:
1. The UK requires employers to give significant paid time off, amounting to 28 days according to Wikipedia (for whatever that's worth)
2. The UK's minimum wage is approximately 50% higher than the US once you factor in the exchange rates.
3. The UK has an maximum required overtime of 48 hours per week.
4. The UK has a lot of restrictions on how you can sack somebody, including notice, a stated reason after 1 year, and an extra payment after 2 years.
5. Not directly part of labour law, but the UK has the National Health Service, so losing one's job doesn't mean losing access to medical care.
This makes a big difference: The US minimum wage is not enough to live on in many areas, many employers give no time off at all, some regularly demand a 60 hour work week, and the normal way to sack someone in the US is for someone to show up at work and get told to clean out their desk (followed by being escorted out of the building by company security). Unionized employees, on the other hand, have a much better chance of getting those kind of benefits.
Regardless of whether "most people" even know this exists, recent polling has about 50% of the public supporting legalization of pot. So yes, legalization is something people want to see changed.
As to whether it affects "most people", a large percentage of adults admit to using pot, which means that practically everybody knows somebody who either uses pot or used pot in the past. Now, it affects non-white people a lot more than white people because the cops bust non-white people a lot more than they bust white people, but it's really an issue that affects the majority of Americans.
Watch me substitute 1 word and make your argument so obviously ridiculous for anyone who knows anything about US history:
Sorry, but if you think making alcohol legal will stop organized crime in any way, you're mistaken. They'll continue to rake in money for pills, cocaine, opiates, underage girls, etc. They would likely even become more violent to protect those remaining assets after losing their alcohol income.
And if you think an alcohol tax is going to raise significant revenue, you're also mistaken. Especially when the market for illegal alcohol exists, with no taxes, and everyone who drinks it already knows where to get it that way. The criminal alcohol element will always exist. It even still exists with cigarettes. People try to skirt taxes on everything all the time, buying across state borders or making their own.
The irony is that the same people who yell for alcohol taxation would be much of the same hypocrites still buying it on street corners to save a buck.
Like I said, heard it before.
Gitmo is open because the Republicans made it impossible to transfer the detainees out.
First off, they're prisoners, not "detainees". I know that's what the US government has been calling them, but when you lock somebody up for years on end, subjecting them to ruthless interrogations and torture (according to everybody's definition of torture except the US government's post-2001), you aren't just detaining them, you're imprisoning them. The meaning of the word "detained" in criminal law is that an officer has required a citizen to stay where they are temporarily (e.g. you can't legally drive off during a traffic stop) which requires the officer only to have a reasonable suspicion.
Second, if Obama was serious about closing down Gitmo, and the Republicans stopped him, here's what he could have said, publicly: "The United States Constitution, which I am bound by law and by oath to uphold, requires me to give everyone a speedy and public trial. The Republicans have prevented me from giving them a public trial. Therefor, I have no choice but to release all prisoners remaining at Gitmo, returning them to their homes." That's not politically convenient, but that is legally what he's supposed to be doing.
The purpose of making marijuana illegal was never "It's a highly dangerous drug." It actually was all about racial fears - to quote from the guy who first pushed for marijuana illegal back in 1937, Harry J Anslinger:
"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others."
"Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with (white) female students, smoking [marijuana] and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution. Result: pregnancy"
"Two Negros took a girl fourteen years old and kept her for two days under the influence of hemp. Upon recovery she was found to be suffering from syphilis."
Similarly, the very first anti-drug laws were aimed at going after Chinese opium dens.
Well, for starters, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
The point at which a different sort of revolution is a viable option is when the rank-and-file military decide to protect the citizens from their government. That's part of what happened in 1775 - the militias and the like were in theory part of the British military. It's what happened in Egypt - when Mubarak sent in the army to try to regain control of Cairo, the army decided to protect the protesters from the police. Probably relevant here is that a significant number of Occupy protesters are either military on leave or recently discharged veterans (including Scott Olsen, severely injured by police in Oakland).
What happens if there's a glitch in the system?
We already know what happens when there's a glitch in robotic policing tools.
Write PAPER letters to your state and national Representatives and Senators (and mayors and governors). Tell them that you want them to OPPOSE this.
That's not going to work, unless your paper letters include large campaign checks. That's the problem: Your elected representatives don't give a damn what you think, because they know that the opposing party's candidate won't attack them for supporting counter-terrorism efforts.
If you really want to do something, find your local Occupy protest and see what kind of help they need to make it through the winter.
It should be noted that that part of thing isn't going to plan: A number of returning US Marines have volunteered to help protect Occupy protesters from the police.
Hopefully our new acronym won't link us to any other unsavory organization.
It does, of course: The Business Software Alliance.
As someone who loves beer, I have to say that mead is also fantastic - Vikings were convinced to go to war by being bribed with the stuff, which should tell you how awesome it is.
Let's just say there's a lot of benefits to being or befriending good brewers.
That's nothing: I took the train from Cleveland to San Diego (2.5 days) for much the same reason. I had the time and the money to stand up for civil liberties, so I decided to walk the walk.
The next step, of course, is to set up similar random checkpoints on highways to try to prevent people from getting around the searches by driving themselves. And then to set up checkpoints on smaller roads because the terrorists could use them to get around the highway checkpoints. Yes, I realize it's a slippery slope argument, but each slide down the slope seems very possible.
I know rules can be bend, and even dodge, etc, so what kind of strategy is being used to keep on doing something illegal to the people of the USA without receiving any consequences?
It's very simple, really: Although there have been rumblings about this sort of thing going back at least as far as Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, the various top political elites have an unwritten but very real agreement to never prosecute each other no matter how heinous the crime. They've also generally had agreement to protect their top financial contributors, which is why practically no executives are in jail for fraud regarding worthless mortgage-backed securities.
Here's where the flaws appear to be:
1. The politically appointed (or in some cases elected) prosecutors can choose whether or not to zealously prosecute a defendant regardless of the strength of the evidence against that defendant. So when Lloyd Blankfein commits fraud on a massive scale, but contributes to the president's campaign, the president tells the AG to tell the US attorneys to ignore any evidence of his crimes.
2. In states with elected judges, it's not uncommon for judges to trade favorable decisions for campaign contributions.
3. And of course, if all else fails and somebody is convicted of a crime, elected leaders can override court decisions with pardons and commutation (e.g. Scooter Libbey).
The trouble is, there's no obvious solution to any of these. Forcing prosecutors to do their jobs won't work because they're the ones responsible for enforcing the rule that says they have to do their job. Appointing judges won't completely work because you'll just get the governor's or the president's cronies. And there's really no way to stop a president from letting somebody go even if they've been convicted of a crime.
Have they gone away, or have they simply gone unenforced?
Great. Now it's just a question of how long it will be before we go to war with Betelgeuse.
Not very - thanks to the speed of light, by the time we get there, we'll find that a hrung has already collapsed on everyone there.
It wasn't - the CEO actually did the right thing.
And I should mention that the company in question here was a Fortune 1000 company, not some startup.