Where do you think that $65 million came from and why don't you think Zuckerberg hasn't already pulled out many times that amount for himself?
AOL, Myspace, and Friendster are far from worthless. They are still billion-dollar and hundred-million dollar companies. and even if Facebook fades in to obscurity it will still have been a billion-dollar company. Eventually everything loses its value, but that doesn't stop people from getting filthy rich, as the founders of all those companies had. Why don't you think that Zuckerberg isn't already filthy rich? By filthy rich I mean so rich that $65 million becomes chump change.
How, exactly? Zuckerberg has a property that is worth a lot of money, and may cash in on it at any time between now and its demise to such an extent as to ensure that he and several generations of his family remain filthy rich, and indeed has been cashing in on it. The Winklevii will have what? Their bitterness (mistakenly) vindicated?
Seriously though, those authorities are morons. If they are calling this sort of behavior terrorism then there one could just as well say capitalism is terrorism.
You won't use up that much now. But hopefully you've realized by now that bandwidth needs grow consistently much like Moore's Law still holds true for transistors on processors. Lots and lots of companies are coming up with all kinds of ways to use bandwidth, Apple is putting your music in the cloud, Netflix is introducing more and more HD content, the cable providers are trying to make your cable TV accessible through your Internet connection. A few years ago we didn't even have a streaming Netflix, a few years before that we didn't have Pandora or YouTube. It's been going up and it will continue to go up. But the caps historically haven't gone up to match, and considering that the cable companies are monopolies, they aren't likely to. So while Comcast et al tell us that only 1% of users hit their cap now, in a few years all of us will hit the caps.
There's supposed to be such a system, it's called impeachment, but nowadays that's only reserved for presidential blowjobs, and in any case Congress is much too acquiescent, if not supportive of such behavior (the unconstitutional, warmongering, power-grabbing stuff, not the blowjobs).
It's because outside of the US it's almost universally acknowledged that the US commits more atrocities with its indiscriminate bombing and things like Collateral Murder than al Qaeda could ever dream of. Inside the US, the jingoistic media convinces the people of various falsehoods like Saddam was collaborating with al Qaeda to build WMDs, Saddam had WMDs at all, al Qaeda is a supranational superpower responsible for most of the death and destruction in the War on Terror (see elsewhere in this comment thread for that one), and all insurgents are al Qaeda and not just people who want the US out of their countries, and that the US takes great pains to avoid the loss of innocent life, all of which are blatant falsehoods designed to maintain domestic support for the US's wars.
Have you seen Collateral Murder? Heard or read of the many drone bombings that almost always kill more innocent bystanders than the supposed "insurgents" or "#3 al Qaeda leaders" they were targeting? Or the rogue murder squad in Afghanistan? Those sort of things may not be the the US' intention, but it is criminally negligent to ignore that they are the inevitable effect of the US's wars. And as far as the victims are concerned, or their families and communities are concerned, whether the US intentionally targets innocents or is merely criminally negligent, is a distinction without a difference. It has the same effect, and might as well be terrorism to them.
Most people think the US are the biggest terrorists, with its dangerously large military spending, its warmongering, and its indiscriminate bombing, hence so do most Slashdotters.
The criminals run things, but we let them. We either don't care enough to participate, or we silently acquiesce, and some even actively support the crimes. Either way, if we don't take responsibility and do something about it, the criminals will continue to run things, and get away with their crimes to boot.
Have you learned nothing from Iraq? Aggressive wars are always worse than the tyranny they claim to attempt to remedy, and that is why they are never legal. No country is the world's policeman, nor should any attempt to be.
First of all, if you are going to topple Libya, why aren't you also taking out Yemen or Syria? Why did you sit idly by when Egypt needed liberation?
Secondly, the US also commits horrible atrocities against its people, having the worst incarceration rate of any country in the world, and one of the worst murder rates, and more pertinently, it frequently violates its own Constitution, and most pertinently, its aggression is a threat to world peace. Is China therefore justified in invading and toppling the US? If you started arguing that the US isn't anything like those countries it attacks, you've missed the point. It doesn't really matter how true any of that is, it didn't matter that none of the claims about Iraq's WMDs were true, the point is the arguments serve the aggressive goals.
al Qaeda had been attempting for years to goad the US in to spending trillions of dollars on an outsized military response. They attempted to blow up the WTC in 1993 but the US treated them like common criminals, arresting and convicting who they could in a Constitutional court. They bombed the USS Cole, and Clinton retaliated by launching missiles at their bases in Sudan and Afghanistan, but Clinton was attacked politically for attempting to distract the country from the far more important Monica Lewinsky scandal. Counterterrorism was a law enforcement response, not a military one. It was only after 9/11, when Bush was in office, that they succeeded in goading the country to war.
I'm going to contradict myself a bit, but really it's just about the one stupid word, motivation.
Nobody in the US really wants to attack Canada, sure, but that isn't to say that nobody wanted to attack the Middle East. Look up the Project for a New American Century. Those guys were itching to attack Iraq and much of the Middle East since the 90s, and they controlled the Bush Administration. In case it wasn't already obvious that everything leading up to the Iraq war was merely looking for a pretext.
The Bush Administration didn't need any motivation to go to war, they were warmongerers who reveled in the idea from the get-go. They needed to convince the people to support the war, and 9/11 attacks that Bush so incompetently allowed to happen were the perfect way to get the people behind it.
Obama didn't sacrifice, he sold out. There were newspaper articles later revealing it but basically while he was claiming to want a public option he had already sold it out to the insurance companies and promised them there wouldn't be one. He was convinced he couldn't win without the insurance companies, when the whole point of the battle was to take them down. He took the enemy's side.
What compromises forced Obama to attack Libya? To assassinate US citizens? To prosecute whistleblowers? And he can't find the money or Congressional approval to close Guantanamo Bay but he can start an illegal war with Libya without either? These are all policy areas where compromise has nothing to do with it, but which Obama has a free hand to do what he wants, and even more so, does what he wants in spite of Congress and in spite of the law. Those actions reveal what his true character is.
Obama's election proves there was popular support for the policies he campaigned on. That's the whole point of an election platform. You get judged on your espoused policies, then you get elected and can claim a mandate to enact them. Bush did just that, even when he didn't have a mandate he claimed one anyway - enacted policies that were exactly what everyone expected him to enact - and proved how powerful the presidency can be. But when Obama got elected and had a much stronger mandate, and control of both houses of Congress, he abandoned all his campaign promises.
It's a basic truism that our character is revealed by our actions, and you don't need any more evidence than that to see that what Obama does, not the pretty words he says, that shows us who he really is.
"but to implying that we are some how targeting more civilians then AQ... you're just being silly."
No, what I am arguing is the sheer level of negligence and nonchalance with which the US kills innocent people - which it kills to a far greater extent than al Qaeda - is the same thing as terrorism to the dead and their surviving families and communities. It's a distinction without a difference. The only context in which it makes a difference is when it comes to the governments. I can guarantee to you that no Pakistani, Afghani, or Iraqi whose children have died from a US drone attack has forgiven the US, or hates them any less because the US claims to be on their side.
300,000? Look up casualties in Iraq on Wikipedia. The estimates vary widely, if only because the US refuses to count the dead beyond their own, not something that reflects well upon them as supposed allies, btw. I used a number that that's within the range of estimates.
"The "terrorists" (let's be specific, Al Qaeda) have killed way more than 3,000 innocents."
Sure, they've killed many thousands of innocent Middle-eastern Muslims too, and a few hundred other Americans before and since, but it was the 9/11 dead, and only those 3000-ish, that motivated the US to war. But they've killed thousands, and the US has killed hundreds of thousands. It's orders of magnitude more.
"your assertion that "we've killed something like 300,000" is an irresponsibly nonspecific charge."
It's impossible to be more specific because the US has refused to bother counting the war dead beyond its own soldiers, which has left us with independent estimates that partisans then assail for also being partisan. It also doesn't help the US' credibility or good will among their victims' families that they don't bother track the number of dead.
And yes, when it comes to aggressive wars, it is absolutely reasonable to blame the aggressor for all the war dead, even those killed by the enemy, because without the aggressive war none of those people would have died.
"Moreover, it is silly to compare numbers that way when many (most?) of the deaths it seems you are saying we are responsible for are also the responsibility of those terrorists."
Do you have an estimate? I can find none on Google. Every number I've ever heard has been in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands.
But the idea that you could possibly attribute most of the war dead in the US' wars to al Qaeda is utterly ridiculous. al Qaeda numbers in the few hundreds, that's an estimate the US DOD freely admits. While the US has hundreds of thousands of soldiers and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its wars. The wars are asymmetrical, al Qaeda are few and very ill-equipped. It's just incomprehensible to imagine how they can possibly be responsible for anything even approaching the numbers killed by the US.
The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and now - or soon - Libyans. It's far, far more death and destruction than can be attributed to al Qaeda on 9/11, or since, or even "the enemy" if you want to include "militants" or "insurgents" - which are basically people who want us to stop killing them and leave their countries. If the US is justified in that, what are those countries, and their allies, justified in doing to the US?
If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?
We aren't "assisting NATO", we are the bulk of NATO, it's just a facade to pretend it isn't the US that's behind this. You can come up with all kinds of feel-good justifications, the US certainly did to justify Iraq, from self-defense to liberating an oppressed people, so call it a limited kinetic humanitarian action, or whatever, but it's still war. And war is the crime from which all these other crimes - such as torture - flow.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
The same reason Bush never went to Congress to authorize it's massive (and massively illegal) warrantless wiretapping, he thinks he has the right to do it without Congressional authorization, or he intents to carve out that right for himself for future wars. If he went to Congress, he couldn't claim that right in the future.
Yes, Obama is just as bad as Bush - far worse actually.
It wouldn't be the first time that the US government claims the right to do things it holds are illegal for everyone else. We torture, we "cyberattack", we proliferate nuclear weapons and WMDs, we attack other countries and wage wars of choice, we violate other countries' sovereignty, all things which we prosecute and punish others for through international courts and extraditions, or would hold to be acts of war if done to us, even while we do the same to the rest of the world.
And we slaughter innocent civilians from those drones almost on a daily basis, and treat it as if it was nothing. The terrorists killed around 3000 innocents, while we've killed something like 300,000, if not far more. To a far greater extent than al Qaeda, we are the terrorists.
"But we can't just agree to ignore the law for presidents we like."
I voted for Obama because he said he would end the presidential lawlessness, end the wars, end the abuse of "state secrets" to block justice through the courts, close Guantanamo Bay and end the 4th and 5th Amendment violations that it represented, and protect whistleblowers. But since he was elected he has done the exact opposite, attempting to assassinate US citizens simply by declaring them enemies of the state with no process whatsoever, escalating the wars and even claiming the power to start more wars without consulting Congress, increased the abuse of state secrets to even prevent cases from being heard, refused to do anything about Guantanamo Bay and even opened up the greater black hole at Bagram, prosecuting whistleblowers to a far greater extent than any previous president ever did, and trying to prosecute Wikileaks under the Espionage Act. All of this is the exact opposite of what he said he would do when we elected him.
The only power citizens have to punish presidential lawlessness is to refuse to reelect them, and when possible, elect the candidate who says they will undo the lawless behavior. And when the country did that, the guy we elected broke every one of his election promises and proved to be much, much worse. And Congress, as well as both parties, have proven to be enthusiastic supporters of all of this. Senator Russ Feingold, the only one who really cared about the rule of law, lost reelection last year. When both parties support government lawlessness, in Congress and the White House, when we elect those who promise to stop it and they turn around and expand upon that lawlessness instead, what option do we have?
The precedent, I'm afraid, has already been set. Nobody who matters supports the rule of law any more; not Congress, and not the courts, nor the mass media, who are all too deferential to presidential power to want to do anything about it, not the parties who both want that power for themselves when they win the White House, and certainly not the executive who reaps the benefits. That sort of unanimity among the branches of government is what establishes precedent for a very long time, generations if not indefinitely.
Are you kidding me? There aren't laws, that's the problem, and the reason the legislature needs to make them. Iraqi law won't help her against an immune American security contractor, and US law won't help her when it happened in Iraq.
How did minority/majority enter in to this? The contracts indemnified the corporations if their employees imprisoned and gang-raped each other on the job. That sort of indemnity has no legitimate reason to exist. It exists purely to allow corporations and their employees get away with breaking the law (because of the wholly unconscionable clause in the contract that says the victim cannot sue her attackers.)
Slashdot Mirror
Chill out. I'll refer you to here: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2261378&cid=36536848
And here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humor
Where do you think that $65 million came from and why don't you think Zuckerberg hasn't already pulled out many times that amount for himself?
AOL, Myspace, and Friendster are far from worthless. They are still billion-dollar and hundred-million dollar companies. and even if Facebook fades in to obscurity it will still have been a billion-dollar company. Eventually everything loses its value, but that doesn't stop people from getting filthy rich, as the founders of all those companies had. Why don't you think that Zuckerberg isn't already filthy rich? By filthy rich I mean so rich that $65 million becomes chump change.
How, exactly? Zuckerberg has a property that is worth a lot of money, and may cash in on it at any time between now and its demise to such an extent as to ensure that he and several generations of his family remain filthy rich, and indeed has been cashing in on it. The Winklevii will have what? Their bitterness (mistakenly) vindicated?
Walter, this isn't a guy who built the railroads here.
Supporting stockholders IS supporting terrorists!
Seriously though, those authorities are morons. If they are calling this sort of behavior terrorism then there one could just as well say capitalism is terrorism.
You won't use up that much now. But hopefully you've realized by now that bandwidth needs grow consistently much like Moore's Law still holds true for transistors on processors. Lots and lots of companies are coming up with all kinds of ways to use bandwidth, Apple is putting your music in the cloud, Netflix is introducing more and more HD content, the cable providers are trying to make your cable TV accessible through your Internet connection. A few years ago we didn't even have a streaming Netflix, a few years before that we didn't have Pandora or YouTube. It's been going up and it will continue to go up. But the caps historically haven't gone up to match, and considering that the cable companies are monopolies, they aren't likely to. So while Comcast et al tell us that only 1% of users hit their cap now, in a few years all of us will hit the caps.
There's supposed to be such a system, it's called impeachment, but nowadays that's only reserved for presidential blowjobs, and in any case Congress is much too acquiescent, if not supportive of such behavior (the unconstitutional, warmongering, power-grabbing stuff, not the blowjobs).
It's because outside of the US it's almost universally acknowledged that the US commits more atrocities with its indiscriminate bombing and things like Collateral Murder than al Qaeda could ever dream of. Inside the US, the jingoistic media convinces the people of various falsehoods like Saddam was collaborating with al Qaeda to build WMDs, Saddam had WMDs at all, al Qaeda is a supranational superpower responsible for most of the death and destruction in the War on Terror (see elsewhere in this comment thread for that one), and all insurgents are al Qaeda and not just people who want the US out of their countries, and that the US takes great pains to avoid the loss of innocent life, all of which are blatant falsehoods designed to maintain domestic support for the US's wars.
Have you seen Collateral Murder? Heard or read of the many drone bombings that almost always kill more innocent bystanders than the supposed "insurgents" or "#3 al Qaeda leaders" they were targeting? Or the rogue murder squad in Afghanistan? Those sort of things may not be the the US' intention, but it is criminally negligent to ignore that they are the inevitable effect of the US's wars. And as far as the victims are concerned, or their families and communities are concerned, whether the US intentionally targets innocents or is merely criminally negligent, is a distinction without a difference. It has the same effect, and might as well be terrorism to them.
Most people think the US are the biggest terrorists, with its dangerously large military spending, its warmongering, and its indiscriminate bombing, hence so do most Slashdotters.
The criminals run things, but we let them. We either don't care enough to participate, or we silently acquiesce, and some even actively support the crimes. Either way, if we don't take responsibility and do something about it, the criminals will continue to run things, and get away with their crimes to boot.
Is it depressing? Or does it offer any helpful solutions? I've had enough with just being depressingly well-informed over the last ten years.
Have you learned nothing from Iraq? Aggressive wars are always worse than the tyranny they claim to attempt to remedy, and that is why they are never legal. No country is the world's policeman, nor should any attempt to be.
First of all, if you are going to topple Libya, why aren't you also taking out Yemen or Syria? Why did you sit idly by when Egypt needed liberation?
Secondly, the US also commits horrible atrocities against its people, having the worst incarceration rate of any country in the world, and one of the worst murder rates, and more pertinently, it frequently violates its own Constitution, and most pertinently, its aggression is a threat to world peace. Is China therefore justified in invading and toppling the US? If you started arguing that the US isn't anything like those countries it attacks, you've missed the point. It doesn't really matter how true any of that is, it didn't matter that none of the claims about Iraq's WMDs were true, the point is the arguments serve the aggressive goals.
al Qaeda had been attempting for years to goad the US in to spending trillions of dollars on an outsized military response. They attempted to blow up the WTC in 1993 but the US treated them like common criminals, arresting and convicting who they could in a Constitutional court. They bombed the USS Cole, and Clinton retaliated by launching missiles at their bases in Sudan and Afghanistan, but Clinton was attacked politically for attempting to distract the country from the far more important Monica Lewinsky scandal. Counterterrorism was a law enforcement response, not a military one. It was only after 9/11, when Bush was in office, that they succeeded in goading the country to war.
I'm going to contradict myself a bit, but really it's just about the one stupid word, motivation.
Nobody in the US really wants to attack Canada, sure, but that isn't to say that nobody wanted to attack the Middle East. Look up the Project for a New American Century. Those guys were itching to attack Iraq and much of the Middle East since the 90s, and they controlled the Bush Administration. In case it wasn't already obvious that everything leading up to the Iraq war was merely looking for a pretext.
The Bush Administration didn't need any motivation to go to war, they were warmongerers who reveled in the idea from the get-go. They needed to convince the people to support the war, and 9/11 attacks that Bush so incompetently allowed to happen were the perfect way to get the people behind it.
Obama didn't sacrifice, he sold out. There were newspaper articles later revealing it but basically while he was claiming to want a public option he had already sold it out to the insurance companies and promised them there wouldn't be one. He was convinced he couldn't win without the insurance companies, when the whole point of the battle was to take them down. He took the enemy's side.
What compromises forced Obama to attack Libya? To assassinate US citizens? To prosecute whistleblowers? And he can't find the money or Congressional approval to close Guantanamo Bay but he can start an illegal war with Libya without either? These are all policy areas where compromise has nothing to do with it, but which Obama has a free hand to do what he wants, and even more so, does what he wants in spite of Congress and in spite of the law. Those actions reveal what his true character is.
Obama's election proves there was popular support for the policies he campaigned on. That's the whole point of an election platform. You get judged on your espoused policies, then you get elected and can claim a mandate to enact them. Bush did just that, even when he didn't have a mandate he claimed one anyway - enacted policies that were exactly what everyone expected him to enact - and proved how powerful the presidency can be. But when Obama got elected and had a much stronger mandate, and control of both houses of Congress, he abandoned all his campaign promises.
It's a basic truism that our character is revealed by our actions, and you don't need any more evidence than that to see that what Obama does, not the pretty words he says, that shows us who he really is.
"but to implying that we are some how targeting more civilians then AQ... you're just being silly."
No, what I am arguing is the sheer level of negligence and nonchalance with which the US kills innocent people - which it kills to a far greater extent than al Qaeda - is the same thing as terrorism to the dead and their surviving families and communities. It's a distinction without a difference. The only context in which it makes a difference is when it comes to the governments. I can guarantee to you that no Pakistani, Afghani, or Iraqi whose children have died from a US drone attack has forgiven the US, or hates them any less because the US claims to be on their side.
300,000? Look up casualties in Iraq on Wikipedia. The estimates vary widely, if only because the US refuses to count the dead beyond their own, not something that reflects well upon them as supposed allies, btw. I used a number that that's within the range of estimates.
"The "terrorists" (let's be specific, Al Qaeda) have killed way more than 3,000 innocents."
Sure, they've killed many thousands of innocent Middle-eastern Muslims too, and a few hundred other Americans before and since, but it was the 9/11 dead, and only those 3000-ish, that motivated the US to war. But they've killed thousands, and the US has killed hundreds of thousands. It's orders of magnitude more.
"your assertion that "we've killed something like 300,000" is an irresponsibly nonspecific charge."
See the estimates for yourself. In Iraq alone the numbers are astonishing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Terror#Casualties
It's impossible to be more specific because the US has refused to bother counting the war dead beyond its own soldiers, which has left us with independent estimates that partisans then assail for also being partisan. It also doesn't help the US' credibility or good will among their victims' families that they don't bother track the number of dead.
And yes, when it comes to aggressive wars, it is absolutely reasonable to blame the aggressor for all the war dead, even those killed by the enemy, because without the aggressive war none of those people would have died.
"Moreover, it is silly to compare numbers that way when many (most?) of the deaths it seems you are saying we are responsible for are also the responsibility of those terrorists."
Do you have an estimate? I can find none on Google. Every number I've ever heard has been in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not even tens of thousands.
But the idea that you could possibly attribute most of the war dead in the US' wars to al Qaeda is utterly ridiculous. al Qaeda numbers in the few hundreds, that's an estimate the US DOD freely admits. While the US has hundreds of thousands of soldiers and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on its wars. The wars are asymmetrical, al Qaeda are few and very ill-equipped. It's just incomprehensible to imagine how they can possibly be responsible for anything even approaching the numbers killed by the US.
The point I'm trying to make is that the US has responded to a terrorist act of death and destruction by indiscriminately raining down death and destruction a hundred or thousand-fold on innocent Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, and now - or soon - Libyans. It's far, far more death and destruction than can be attributed to al Qaeda on 9/11, or since, or even "the enemy" if you want to include "militants" or "insurgents" - which are basically people who want us to stop killing them and leave their countries. If the US is justified in that, what are those countries, and their allies, justified in doing to the US?
If they bombed the US with drones would it be okay because it isn't "hostile"?
We aren't "assisting NATO", we are the bulk of NATO, it's just a facade to pretend it isn't the US that's behind this. You can come up with all kinds of feel-good justifications, the US certainly did to justify Iraq, from self-defense to liberating an oppressed people, so call it a limited kinetic humanitarian action, or whatever, but it's still war. And war is the crime from which all these other crimes - such as torture - flow.
"To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
He didn't have authorization for his massively illegal warrentless wiretapping program, or Guantanamo Bay and many of its associated abuses.
Obama got elected on a platform of repudiating all that, then once he gained office he instead embraced and expanded upon it.
The same reason Bush never went to Congress to authorize it's massive (and massively illegal) warrantless wiretapping, he thinks he has the right to do it without Congressional authorization, or he intents to carve out that right for himself for future wars. If he went to Congress, he couldn't claim that right in the future.
Yes, Obama is just as bad as Bush - far worse actually.
Every day I am more and more convinced that they replaced Obama's brain with Dick Cheney's.
It wouldn't be the first time that the US government claims the right to do things it holds are illegal for everyone else. We torture, we "cyberattack", we proliferate nuclear weapons and WMDs, we attack other countries and wage wars of choice, we violate other countries' sovereignty, all things which we prosecute and punish others for through international courts and extraditions, or would hold to be acts of war if done to us, even while we do the same to the rest of the world.
And we slaughter innocent civilians from those drones almost on a daily basis, and treat it as if it was nothing. The terrorists killed around 3000 innocents, while we've killed something like 300,000, if not far more. To a far greater extent than al Qaeda, we are the terrorists.
"But we can't just agree to ignore the law for presidents we like."
I voted for Obama because he said he would end the presidential lawlessness, end the wars, end the abuse of "state secrets" to block justice through the courts, close Guantanamo Bay and end the 4th and 5th Amendment violations that it represented, and protect whistleblowers. But since he was elected he has done the exact opposite, attempting to assassinate US citizens simply by declaring them enemies of the state with no process whatsoever, escalating the wars and even claiming the power to start more wars without consulting Congress, increased the abuse of state secrets to even prevent cases from being heard, refused to do anything about Guantanamo Bay and even opened up the greater black hole at Bagram, prosecuting whistleblowers to a far greater extent than any previous president ever did, and trying to prosecute Wikileaks under the Espionage Act. All of this is the exact opposite of what he said he would do when we elected him.
The only power citizens have to punish presidential lawlessness is to refuse to reelect them, and when possible, elect the candidate who says they will undo the lawless behavior. And when the country did that, the guy we elected broke every one of his election promises and proved to be much, much worse. And Congress, as well as both parties, have proven to be enthusiastic supporters of all of this. Senator Russ Feingold, the only one who really cared about the rule of law, lost reelection last year. When both parties support government lawlessness, in Congress and the White House, when we elect those who promise to stop it and they turn around and expand upon that lawlessness instead, what option do we have?
The precedent, I'm afraid, has already been set. Nobody who matters supports the rule of law any more; not Congress, and not the courts, nor the mass media, who are all too deferential to presidential power to want to do anything about it, not the parties who both want that power for themselves when they win the White House, and certainly not the executive who reaps the benefits. That sort of unanimity among the branches of government is what establishes precedent for a very long time, generations if not indefinitely.
Are you kidding me? There aren't laws, that's the problem, and the reason the legislature needs to make them. Iraqi law won't help her against an immune American security contractor, and US law won't help her when it happened in Iraq.
How did minority/majority enter in to this? The contracts indemnified the corporations if their employees imprisoned and gang-raped each other on the job. That sort of indemnity has no legitimate reason to exist. It exists purely to allow corporations and their employees get away with breaking the law (because of the wholly unconscionable clause in the contract that says the victim cannot sue her attackers.)