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* Russia and Kurds * U.S. Troops and Chalabi * Haitian Election
“Stung by Vladimir Putin’s military intervention, Obama last week foreswore his previous refusal to put boots on the ground, announcing he’s sending a small contingent of U.S. special operations commandos to help America’s close allies, the Syrian Kurdish rebels. But to scant notice, the Kurds are receiving increased support from Russia as well — and are about to open an office in Moscow — in what has become a high-stakes poker game for influence in the region.”
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Left and Right Opposing the “Privatization of the Justice System”
“Forced arbitration clauses impact virtually every aspect of your life, from buying a car to credit card agreements to your employment. They even wipe out the right to go to court for many civil rights violations. The constitutional right of a citizen to sue has been fundamentally taken away.”
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A Tale of Two Retirements
“We examined the retirement assets of the Fortune 500 CEOs. … One CEO, David Novak from YUM Brands (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC), has $234 million in his retirement account, yet hundreds of thousands of YUM’s low-wage restaurant workers have no retirement at all.”
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Sanders’ Post Office Banking for Nearly 100 Million “Unbanked”
“The USPS doesn’t spend taxpayer money, and would run at a profit but for the poisonous provision of the Postal Enhancement and Accountability Act of 2006, which requires it to fund its pensions decades into the future. Postal banking, for extremely low fees and lending rates, would make the USPS financially solvent while providing a ‘public option’ for those unable or unwilling to utilize private banks or expensive alternative services.”
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Is the Administration Finally Fessing up on School Testing?
“Unfortunately the Department continues to call for annual testing and for making high-stakes decisions based on student growth (gains in test scores), including evaluations of teachers and teacher-preparation programs, despite the critique by researchers that such use of ‘value-added modeling’ has proven to be neither valid nor reliable for such decision-making. Giving states some flexibility in how to use such test data does not address this more fundamental validity problem.”
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Saudi Bombing of Doctors Without Borders
“I have personally been in touch with the MSF International Communication Officer in Yemen Malak Shaher who confirmed yesterday that they share the right GPS coordinates of the places MSF is found with the operations room of the Saudi-led coalition every week. She said literally, ‘MSF confirms the right GPS coordinates of Haydan hospital were shared with the coalition forces. There are sent every week to the coalition operations room, last time the 24th of October. Haydan hospital was destroyed by airstrikes of the Saudi-led coalition on October 26.'”
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Left and Right Opposing Surveillance Bill
“Members of Congress who voted for CISA can’t explain how the bill will protect us from cyber attacks, because it won’t. Instead, the bill offers a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ deal between corporations and the government that encourages corporations to share massive amounts of private customer information with the government in exchange for legal immunity from lawsuits. No wonder the Chamber of Commerce supports it.”
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Why is Syria Burning?
“On the surface, the United States is fighting against the Islamic State mainly because it went into Iraq. They didn’t seem to mind it when they were just in Syria. But they’re still allowing Turkey to keep its border open for men and supplies to come into the Islamic State. And they still — if they’re fighting the Islamic State, they’re still allowing the Saudis to provide the Islamic State and…other similar jihadist groups [like] al-Qaeda to receive weapons, including anti-tank weapons, from the Saudis.”
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* Paul Ryan * Holding Social Security Hostage
“Last night, the Republican leadership agreed to release their hostages: the need to raise the debt limit, the need to keep the government operating, and the need to ensure that all Social Security benefits can continue to be paid in full and on time beyond 2016. When hostage takers release their hostages, we are, of course, relieved that the hostages are no longer in harm’s way, but this is nothing to celebrate. That the ransom isn’t steeper is also not something to celebrate.”
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U.S. Used NGO as Front in North Korea Spying
“A project such as this also demonstrates the failure of U.S. intelligence agencies, and the wasting of billions of dollars spent yearly on them: if all the ‘spy vs. spy’ stuff that the intelligence agencies have at their disposal cannot get the intelligence the government says it needs, then let’s disband these so-called ‘intelligence’ operations and use the money to help people.”
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn