A lot of people in Silicon Valley did what career counselors have told them to do: went into STEM fields, studied hard, got good grades, and went to work for big successful firms like Apple, Google, and even Facebook.

And how did these companies respond?

They set up no-poaching agreements with other firms in the Valley to limit their employee’s salaries and enhance the incomes of mid-to-upper management.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/19/damning-evidence-emerges-in-google-apple-no-poach-antitrust-lawsuit/

Because Wikileaks does not regurgitate White House press releases or employ CIA agents and Democratic/Republican party apparatchiks to pose as journalists (and instead publishes prime source material), the government of the United States will classify them as pseudo-terror-hacktivists, not a media organization.

I agree with you, Don Bacon,

Let me also add that our standard of living began declining around 2000. It is not Bush or Obama that is to blame. Our living standards were decimated by the Free Trade agreements that both parties fully supported. We will never recover the middle class as long as we participate in a corporate-driven global economy, that is very much anti-labor. However, the dog and pony show in DC will never admit this to be the reality.

I’m just so damned tired of it all, and failing to see the trigger that will force change. If someone had told me in 2008 that we’d still be humming right along in the beginning of 2013 as though nothing untoward, much less criminal, has happened, I would have laughed, but here we are. I suspect my belief in imminent collapse is fueled by a distinct lack of imagination at the ways they can continue to keep the plates spinning.

Well, personally, I don’t think this is a surprise.

I distinctly recall in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 Bush II openly and explicitly calling for Hollywood and the various other media to help bolster “American’s” support for the “War on Terror”. Same intent only orders of magnitude more sophisticated and powerful than what we had in WWII.

It seems pretty silly for Obama to be talking about cutting Social Security when Social Security is totally exempt from automatic spending cuts, aka sequestration. All Obama has do to get the Republicans on board to lifting the debt limit is to approve of the sequestration cuts, which largely involves making single-digit, across-the-board spending cuts to Medicare and the Defense Department. Unless these cuts aren’t enough to please Republicans, which I don’t think is the case, Obama has no good reason to propose spending cuts to Social Security.

The scary thing about what happened to Aaron Swartz is that he was a “doer”, not just a “talker”. There’s a lot of hot wind out there, but Swartz didn’t just talk. He took action. And look what happened. Taking action to support your principles is what the government will not tolerate, not even a little bit. That’s why people can talk all day long. Talk, blog, protest, etc … that’s all ok, because for the most part it changes nothing. Taking action DOES change things, and the government will not tolerate that — even if it’s totally legal and within your rights. This is why things as a simply as taking pictures on a factory farm (to expose animal cruelty) can land you ten years in prison and a “terrorist” label in today’s world. Simply exposing the truth cannot be tolerated by power factions, the Constitution be damned. The powerful couldn’t care less about the law, the Constitution, ethics, morals, etc …. They only care about maintain what they see as the natural order of things, at all costs.

What happened to Aaron Swartz is a tragedy and I fear that what happened to him will make people scared of taking action. I hope the opposite happens, but one cannot be surprised if it doesn’t.

H/T:Glenn Greenwald

Aaron Swartz was aggressively prosecuted and threatened with a massive 35 year prison sentence by federal prosecutors for allegedly downloading millions of (taxpayer-funded)articles, essays and scholarly works from MIT’s databases, an act that was done not for money or malice, but to promote the critical truth that no society can be saved from the oligarchs and plutocrats, who core purpose for waking each morning is the desire to concentrate their power & resources while slinking in the shadows (and not be exposed to the light of day), while Jon Corzine walks as a free man, not even threatened with prosecution, while entities such as Goldman Sachs & TBTF banks pay relatively trivial fines (that represent a small % of ill gotten gains that they reaped) for far greater sins and crimes, and while murderous tyrants in African nations are left free to systematically rape and kill innocent humans (as they have been free to do for decades, while the west wages trillion dollar warfare in the “other” places that have deep reserves of oil and/or are systemically important in the never-ending saga of Arab/Israeli tension).

Shame on the DoJ, shame on MIT (not just for this, but for being a co-opted and corrupted arm of the U.S. Government, the DoD/Pentagon/NSA in particular, rather than the bastion of academic progress and excellence it promotes itself as), and shame on all of academia for either following in the footsteps of MIT (that would be you, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, et al.) or for their deafening silence on the original sin of MIT.

Aron Swartz was liberating information that was paid for by the public. JSTOR is a store for academic articles that the public have to pay unnecessarily high charges to view. Academics are trained by the state, their research is, for the most part, funded by the state. Academic publishers are just another example of corporate welfare. Swartz was liberating what, in any just society, belonged to the public.

I’m looking forward when all of those overpaid CEO jobs are shipped overseas to China as well. And why the hell are fire fighters and police officers exempt from this and other so-called right-to-work laws? Could it be because the corporate elite need these union thugs on their side to protect and save them from an angry mob of low-wage workers.

What’s needed is a four-way race, not just a three-way race. That way votes will be taken away from not just one of the dominant parties, i.e. the Democrats or the Republicans, but both of them.

Just check out Obama’s new drone
“In The Land Of The Free” it’s flown
Nothing will save
“The Home Of The Brave”
Tyrannical forces have grown

The Limerick King

http://www.flickr.com/photos/expd/7599092190/

Maybe Ron Paul is bigoted against blacks, as some are now claiming he is, but at least he’s not bigoted against Muslims like all of the other Republican presidential candidates are, including Barack Obama. There is really no other way to explain why all of them continue to support our long and brutal wars of aggression against the Muslim world, most of which are aimed at killing innocent Muslims.

Some of this can be explained by all of these presidential candidates being in the back pockets of the oil industry, the weapons industry, and last but not least, the Israel lobby. But most of this can be explained by their blatant bigotry against Muslims, especially Muslims that share the same region of the world with Israel.

Believe me, I’m no fan of Ron Paul for a number of reasons, a number which is too numerous to count, but I think he deserves an enormous amount of credit for having the guts to go up against our corrupt imperialist warmongers, who are second only to our corrupt imperialist banksters, when it comes destroying our country and our economy from the inside out.

Hasn’t anyone here wondered why all of the GOP presidential candidates are completely batshit crazy? I think it’s because the Republicans have no need to defeat Obama. Why should they?

Why should the Republicans waste their precious time and money running a presidential candidate to defeat Obama, when he’s the perfect Republican president. Obama is everything that a Republican would want from a president; he’s pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and pro- police state. So it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that Republicans and Democrats are colluding with each other to make certain that the vast majority of elected officials in Washington make policy decisions and enact laws with a pro-war/pro-police state/pro-Wall Street agenda in mind.

This is one of the dangers of having a duopoly, be it on Wall Street or Pennsylvania Avenue. If it were discovered that Verizon and AT&T were colluding with each other to keep cell phone rates artificially high, they’d be fined and broken up, and their CEOs would be thrown in jail.

So I’d like to see the same thing happen to the Republicans and Democrats when it’s discovered that they have been colliding with each other to only support political candidates who are pro-war, pro-Wall Street, and pro-police state. Now that it’s all too clear that Republicans and Democrats have become nothing more than two sides on the same coin, then it’s time to break up this corrupt political duopoly of ours, that’s based on a fascist blend of corporatism and militarism.

Perry is a shinier version of GWB. I don’t like Obama but at least he doesn’t think he gets direct calls from Jesus every morning.

Perry is funded by the Wall Streeters that run Pennsylvania Avenue. He pretends to hate them just like Obama pretended to hate them before he got elected. If Perry fools enough people, like Obama did, and actually gets elected, he will not bite the hands that feed him. It will just be the continued employment of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Perry call girl ring for the neoliberal financiers that run the international banking cartel.

Rest assured my fellow plebs, Barack Obama and other sociopathic politicians, who are being hired by the plutocratic power structure within our too-big-to-fail-’n'-jail banking system to give us plebs massive doses of a neoliberal form of shock therapy, will make certain that the holes in the social safety net are just small enough to prevent the fat cats on Wall Street from falling through it:

http://www.otherwords.org/media/safety_net

And this cartoon by the masterful Mr. Fish depicts Obama and his reverse-Robin Hood agenda to a T:

http://www.truthdig.com/cartoon/item/obamahood_20110727/

Social Security has still managed to pay for itself, despite being raided several times over to pay for our trillion-dollar wars and keep many of other federal programs afloat, namely Medicare and Medicaid. Talk about maintaining resilience in the face of repeated predatory attacks!

And Medicare and Medicaid wouldn’t be in so much debt today had our for-profit health care system not used them as a way to socialize its losses. This is why our medical-industrial complex is the epitome of crony capitalism, second only to our military-industrial complex.