News on Egypt, Etc.

 

There are huge events inside of Egypt presently. The Egyptian Vice President ElBaradei resigned. This comes while clashes across Egypt leave more than 270 dead. Mohamed split with the nation's leader. There is more fighting between security forces and the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. ElBaradei wrote a resignation letter to Interim President Adly Mansour as the day's death toll from the clashes throughout Egypt mounted. "It has become difficult for me to continue bearing responsibility for decisions that I do not agree with and whose consequences I fear," ElBaradei wrote. "I cannot bear the responsibility for one drop of blood.'' All of these things occurred, because a military coup overthrew the Morsi. Despite the errors of Morsi, the people of Egypt should have handled the situation not the military using reactionary tactics. Egypt's Health Ministry said that 278 human beings were killed in violence on Wednesday throughout the country including 235 civilians.  The violence caused Mansour to declare a month long state of emergency and a curfew on Cairo including 10 provinces. He ordered the armed forces to support the police in efforts to restore law and order and protect state facilities. Even some in the White House and several European leaders have criticized the crackdown. The military has harshly cracked down on Morsi protesters. Egypt is unwavering. Egypt's plans for democracy now are very uncertain. An alliance of pro-Morsi groups said the 17-year-old daughter of senior Muslim Brotherhood Mohammed el-Beltagy, Asmaa Mohammed el-Beltagy, was killed in the Nasr City raid. Islam Tawfiq, a Brotherhood member at the Nasr City sit-in, said that the camp's medical center was filled with dead bodies and that the injured included children. "No one can leave and those who do are either arrested or beaten up," he told the Associated Press. So, we know the truth. We see a military dictatorship going out of control. Sky Middle East Correspondent Sam Kiley, reporting from inside the Rabaa al Adawiya camp in Cairo, said it was “under very heavy gunfire” and was a “massive military assault on largely unarmed civilians in very large numbers." He said government forces were using machine guns, snipers, AK-47 and M16 rifles and were firing into the crowd. Kiley added: “There are machine gun rounds, and snipers on the roof, that are preventing people from getting any closer to the field hospital (in the camp). “I haven’t seen any evidence yet of any weapons on the side of the pro-Morsi camp. The camp is very full of women and children.” He said it was a scene of “extreme chaos and bloodshed” and “many hundreds of troops and interior ministry police and special forces are involved." “The dead and dying are on the steps of an improvised field hospital. The scenes here are absolutely graphic…." There is video of protests and the harm done to churches and police stations. So, we have an illegal military junta in Egypt that wants to use brutality to stop demonstrations. These events in Egypt have been tragic and very hardcore. More human beings died yesterday than in the clashes in Cairo. There are complex ideological dynamics in the country. There are the Muslim Brotherhood issues, secularists, more reactionary theocratic forces, etc. The Muslim Brotherhood and the military do not like each and they are clashing now in Egypt. The resistance to the military junta in Egypt has grown.




The state of North Carolina passed the most draconian voting ID law in the nation so far. This law was signed by Republican Governor Pat McCrory. It is a massive voter suppression bill. Numerous different provisions of the bill are used to restrict voting in other states. The bill will reduce turnout among turnout among minority, low income, and student voters. Students, low-income voters and racial minorities, of course, tend to vote for Democrats. McCrory, and the lawmakers behind this bill, are Republicans. The bill wants voters to show a government approved driver’s license, passport, veteran's ID, and tribal card as a means to vote in 2016 elections and beyond. Students IDs are not acceptable form of identification. The bill reduces early voting by a week. It eliminates same-day registration, ends pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds and a student civics program, kills an annual state-sponsored voter registration drive and lessens the amount of public reporting required for so-called dark money groups, also known as 501(c) (4)s. The bill does provide for a "free ID" to be offered at DMVs, though the state estimates that between 203,351 and 318,643 voters registered in North Carolina lack IDs, and that providing them with one would cost $834,200 in 2013 and 2014, and $24,100 every two years after that. There have been very miniscule incidents of voter fraud, but the reactionary Governor McCrory still loves the law. The North Carolina NAACP and the ACLU of North Carolina including a coalition of other groups file a lawsuit against the bill. They charge that it violates the Constitution's equal protection clause and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It does in my estimation. The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit is the 92 year old Sister named Rosanell Eaton. He was a registered voter since the 1940's. The NAACP said that Eaton will be adversely affected by the new law. “Mrs. Eaton, who was born at home, has a current North Carolina driver’s license, but the name on her certified birth certificate does not match the name on her driver’s license or the name on her voter registration card,” the lawsuit notes. “Mrs. Eaton will incur substantial time and expense to correct her identification documents to match her voter registration record in order to meet the new requirements.” In Voting voter fraud has been very low. ABC News reports that “out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases or about .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.” The Koch Brothers love these types of laws. Poor human beings will suffer by this law, because getting the IDs needed to get the few pieces of state issued ID that would be acceptable under this bill still amounts to a prohibitive poll tax. For several reasons, older voters will get hit hard.  Some older voters don’t have a birth certificate which is needed to get the few pieces of government issued ID allowed under this bill.  Since the bill reduces early voter days and hours, it means they will have to wait in line much longer than before.  Even then, since the bill also prevents poll stations from extending their hours on Election Day to accommodate people who have been waiting in a long line, there is no assurance that voters regardless of age will actually get to vote at all. 56% of North Carolinians used early voting in 2012, so this bill will have a negative impact on the majority of North Carolina's voters. Now, the North Carolina law is a draconian piece of legislation for many reasons. The law has a strict voter ID requirement when many of the elderly do not have the resources nor the documentation to have that government issued ID. The law cuts early voting by a full week, which will harms those in foreign locations and with other situations to vote. The purpose of voting is to allow as much human beings possible to vote, who are legal citizens not to restrict legal citizens the right to vote. It increases the influence of money in election, which is a sick corporate exploitation of the political system. It only permits citizens to vote in their specific precinct not in any ward or election district. It forbids young adults from pre registering as 16 and 17 years old. It ends some types of paid voter registration drives. It ends 3 state public financing programs. It prevents counties from extending polling hours in the events of long lines. These actions are beyond simple ID requirements. So, Rosa Neil Eaton does inspire all freedom loving human beings of all backgrounds to fight for voting rights, equality, true love, and human dignity.

 

 

The administration grants waivers to on limits to out of pocket health costs. This comes with the deadline for the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or the ACA. This has been less than five months away. News came recently that another consumer provision is being delayed. The federal officials granted a one year grace period for insurers to adhere to limits on out of pocket costs of health care for individuals and families they insure. The caps on out on out of pocket costs have been one key portion of ACA. The President pledged that would guarantee affordable health care for virtually every America. Yet, the administration officials have confirmed that through 2014, many insurers would be allowed to set high limits or no limits at all on deductibles, co-payments, and other out of pocket costs to be paid by the insured. The health care bill originally stipulated that out of pocket cost could not exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. These sums that are already extremely burdensome for working class families. Yet, the New York Times reported that a concession was made to insurers and employers. It noted on the Department of Labor's website that and according to the Times, “obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed.” The Labor Department web site’s “FAQs about Affordable Care Act Implementation Part XII” reported that many group health plans will be able to apply separate out-of-pocket limits for different components of coverage. For instance, an individual could be required to pay $6,350 out of pocket for doctor visits and hospital care, and another $6,350 for prescription drugs. For all of 2014, in group  plans that currently have no limits on out of pocket costs for prescription drugs, there will be no requirements that insurers impose any limit whatsoever on these costs. Under conditions where cancer and other life-saving drugs can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, many people will be plunged into massive debt or personal bankruptcy, or be forced to go without these medications. In September 2009, lobbying before Congress for passage of the ACA, President Obama declared: “We will place a limit on how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they get sick.” It is clear that this is precisely what the victims of this latest opt-out of compliance provided by the government will face. The Obama administration tries to justify this delay of caps by citing company computer systems. The ACA was to be fully activated by 2014. The ACA from the beginning was created and advanced the interests of large employers, private insurance companies, and giant pharmaceuticals. Many of these companies want to increase their profits. The White House has announced that it would delay until 2015 one of the central parts of the law (or the requirement that companies with 50 or more full time employees provide insurance to those working 30 hours a week more more). Many companies with waivers will not provide their workers with real affordable health care. The individual mandate though will remain. It starts at January 1, 2014. It will affect working families and the poor since they have to get insurance or pay a penalty. Modest government subsidies will be provided for those who qualify. Some employers are cutting workers' hours as a means to not give coverage to workers who work less than 30 hours a week. Some employees want to offer minimal services as a means to have a loophole. So, the ACA creates another class based system of health care. The vast majority of the workers and families will have inferior, cut rate services, while the wealthy will have the best health care money can buy. The health care system can never be reformed where corporations dominate it for the sake of profit. We need universal, single payer quality health care where that profit is removed and health care is truly affordable. Universal health care is fine with me. Health care is a human right.

 

Stop and frisk is a blatant immorality in New York City. No matter who you are, you have the right to not to be search and frisked without probable cause. Search and frisking of totally innocent human beings without just cause is immoral. That is a police state like tactic like the Nazis did against innocent Jewish human beings of Berlin, Paris, etc. decades ago. The federal judge named Shira Scheindlin made a ruling. The ruling said that the Police Department of NYC engages in unconstitutional racial profiling. The decision makes the right point that 87 percent of those stopped in 2011 were black or Hispanic. There has been testimony from more than 100 witnesses in reaching a number of alarming, factual, and legal conclusions about the sweeping, discriminatory, and insidious nature of the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy. Now, the NYPD readily target black and Hispanic males from ages 14 to 20 as they are falsely classified as the right people for the purpose of stop and frisk, which is racist. Chief Esposito admitted that reasonable suspicion is readily not used when the stop and frisk actions are achieved. There are de facto quota stops in many of these unjustified stops.  In 2010, New York City passed a law that prohibited the enforcement of quotas for tickets, arrests, stops, or summonses. The NYPD has since said it has no numerical requirements that pressure officers to make stops regardless of the legal justification. But in 2011, NYPD instituted a performance review program that includes “goals” for meeting these metrics that Judge Scheindlin concluded are “sometimes nothing more than a euphemism for an acceptable number of stops, arrests, and summonses in targeted locations.” There is no assessment of whether these stops are legally justified and “[f]or the purposes of performance review, an unconstitutional stop is no less valuable than a constitutional one.” “It is difficult,” Scheindlin concluded, “to see any difference between a performance goal and a quota if ‘performance goals’ operate as Deputy Commissioner Beirne testified,” and so long as there are quotas with threat of punishment, there is an incentive to stop individuals to meet goals, rather than to enforce violations of the law. The NYPD disproportionately stops African Americans and Hispanics even when accounting for the crime rate and other statistical data. Most of those stopped and frisks are innocent of any crime or offense. Most arrested faced only charges for marijuana. An innocent population is never equivalent to a criminal suspect population in the same area. Not to mention that the NYPD regularly goes out to carry more stops in high minority areas regardless of the crime rates in those neighborhoods. “The racial composition of a precinct or census tract predicts the stop rate above and beyond the crime rate,” she concludes. What’s more, she finds that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped in particular neighborhoods than whites in every neighborhood, even when controlling for all other variables. Officers were 14 percent more likely to use force against blacks, and stops of blacks were less likely to lead to a sanction or other enforcement action. The NYPD has admitted that the stop and frisk rate is likely inflated. Only 6 percent of these stop and frisks result in arrest and 6 percent results in a summons. These actions humiliate citizens and create more distrust among citizens and the policy. It harms public safety. The crime rate in NYC continues to fall even as the NYPD curbs its stops in 2012. Scheindlin cites another ruling that police stops in the Bronx for alleged trespassing are likely unconstitutional. So, stop and frisk is immoral, is a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and we will continue to fight for human rights in the world.



It is easy to see that the Democratic establishment has moved into more reactionary territory as time went on. Many Democrats from yesteryear would be called a radical today by the Tea Party types. Even FDR (despite his imperfections) said that he welcomed the hatred of the reactionaries. Head Start, food stamps, work/study, Medicare, and Medicaid came about because of the War on Poverty ethos from the 1960's. We see that members from both the Republicans and the Democrats have been hostile to a genuine, real social safety net system. Many Democrats presented themselves as the lesser of 2 evils when they have been the more effective evil in getting their agenda done in the 21st century. Now, both parties are pro-war. Paranoia about terrorism has been part of the nomenclature among political elites for over 10 years now. In fact, most of the United States' twentieth century wars were initiated by mostly Democrats not Republicans. Republicans initiated the war on terror in the 21st century though. The first significant presidential act of Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, was to order two atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing estimated 200,000 Japanese. Truman went on to launch the Korean War in 1950. As early as 1951, a Gallup poll showed 66 percent of Americans wanted U.S. troops to pull out of the Korean War. In 1952, 51 percent agreed that it was a “mistake” to intervene in Korea at all.  There was no massive movement to oppose the War. Four million Korean civilians out of the Five million human beings died from the Korean War. Campaigning for election in 1964, Democratic candidate Lyndon B. Johnson pledged, “We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves..." As we know months later, Johnson escalated U.S. troop involvement in the Vietnam War. Even the AFL-CIO convention in 1965 supported the Johnson administration in using the military as a means to fight Vietnam. It was only in 1970 that AFL-CIO's vice President Walter Reuther said to Nixon that, "We must mobilize for peace rather than wider theaters of war." This came in the midst of a very strong anti-war movement and the continued bloodshed in the Vietnam War. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, it marked the modern shift of the Democratic Party into neoliberal status. Bill Clinton used the military to advance U.S. interests as he sad that he would do. He intervened in Haiti. He allowed the U.S. support NATO in its war against Yugoslavia in 1999. NATO committed war crimes in Belgrade and other locations in that region of the world. He bombed Sudan and Afghanistan too. He bombed Iraq during his no fly zone exercises. Clinton supported cruel sanctions against Iraq where over million Iraqis died from 1991 to 2003. Even Clinton's Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told 60 Minutes journalist Leslie Stahl that the sanctions against even innocent Iraqis were worth it. The New Deal Coalition came in the 1930's since the Great Depression was harsh that revolutionary fervor was in the air. That is why Roosevelt made concessions by allowing once the Wagner Act or the National Labor Relations Act to come about. It made it illegal for employers to refuse to bargain with union. He passed the Social Security Act as it gave the poorest families and the elderly some standard of living. Much of the New Deal coalition included real folks and evil Dixiecrats too. So, the establishment allowed concessions to happen as a means to prevent real revolution (and concede that the worst aspects of capitalism harmed the poor). When the reactionary Richard Nixon was President in 1968, he had to deal with social activist movements of all kinds. Nixon hated the war on poverty programs, so he continued with his own policies. In the mid 1970's, the growth of neoliberalism came about. Neoliberalism allowed the business elite to use policies to lower the working class living standards, while increasing corporate profits (which leads into an increase of economic inequality). Real wages were falling in 1974 and more automation came about as predicted by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The corporate tax rate fell from 1969 to 1981. Reagan cut heavily many social safety net programs like AFDC or the Aid to Families with Dependent Children. Clinton (an ally of the DLC) supported NAFTA, and wanted to end welfare as we know it. In 1994, he transformed AFDC into a temporary program requiring all able-bodied recipients to go to work after two years. In 1996, facing reelection, Clinton signed the Republican-sponsored Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, extinguishing the hallmark of the New Deal by relieving the government of any responsibility to care for the poor, limiting poor women and children to a five-year lifetime limit. Yet, he is called the golden Savior of all Creation by his adherents. So, Clinton had his reactionary side just the overt reactionary agenda of the Bush administration from 2001. The Clinton Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act made it more palatable for the more repressive Patriot Act to come about, which was passed after September 11, 2001. Any form of inequality from economic to social is always evil, justifiable, and morally repugnant period. So, history is filled with social changes. Today, neoliberal is still an ideological cancer plaguing both parties. We can see the drone attacks, the Simpson-Bowles agenda, and the NSA scandal to witness examples of that. So, it is our job to fight for justice and truth irrespective of times changing.

By Timothy