Bernie Sanders - Vermont Senate Votes to Overturn Citizens United

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) welcomed today's Vermont Senate passage of a resolution calling on Congress to propose a constitutional amendment to undo a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out a ban on corporate campaign spending.

"I congratulate the Vermont Senate for this important vote. Citizens United was one of the worst decisions ever handed down by the Supreme Court. The people of Vermont and across America are totally disgusted with the huge amounts of money that billionaires and corporations are now throwing into the political process as a result of that misguided decision," Sanders said.

"The Vermont Senate has now added its strong voice to a grassroots movement that is growing all across the United States," he added. "We must overturn this disastrous decision."

The Vermont Senate resolution asks Congress to consider an amendment to clarify that "money is not speech and corporations are not persons under the U.S. Constitution."

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 http://www.opednews.com/articles/Vermont-Senate-Votes-to-Ov-by-Bernie-Sanders-120413-609.html

Paul Craig Roberts - Washington Leads The World Into Lawlessness

The US government pretends to live under the rule of law, to respect human rights, and to provide freedom and democracy to citizens. Washington’s pretense and the stark reality are diametrically opposed. 

US government officials routinely criticize other governments for being undemocratic and for violating human rights. Yet, no other country except Israel sends bombs, missiles, and drones into sovereign countries to murder civilian populations. The torture prisons of Abu Gahraib, Guantanamo, and CIA secret rendition sites are the contributions of the Bush/Obama regimes to human rights.  

Washington violates the human rights of its own citizens. Washington has suspended the civil liberties guaranteed in the US Constitution and declared its intention to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process of law.  President Obama has announced that he, at his discretion, can murder US citizens whom he regards as a threat to the US.

Read More:

http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=30273

Renee Parsons - Operation Shamrock and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Despite an idealistic vision of the country's devotion to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights amendments, it may come as a shock to any American who has not been paying attention that the US government has been conducting illegal unconstitutional surveillance on its citizens for much of the last hundred years. 

In what may have been the country's earliest coordinated effort at unconstitutional snooping, a government agency ominously named Black Chamber was in cahoots with Western Union after WWI to retrieve copies of telegrams in violation of the Radio Communications Act of 1912 and the Fourth Amendment.

Read More:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/operation-shamrock-and-th_b_1406643.html

Mark Karlin - Scalia Believes Innocent People Can Be Executed, So He's Not Going to Care About People Dying From Not Having Health Insurance

In 2000, most legal pundits said that Bush v. Gore would never make it the Supreme Court, because voting was a states' right issue. Boy, were they wrong.

In fact, many legal analysts and scholars prognosticate about Supreme Court behavior as if it were of a single mind looking at the Constitution and the law in a serious, scholarly way.

But that perspective of considering the law conscientiously in terms of precedent and the nation's founding legal document forgets one thing: four of the Supreme Court justices are total partisan hacks. Alito, Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts are activist right wing judges who decide many major cases for political reasons first - and then find twisted legal justifications for their decisions. Kennedy usually joins with them in major 5-4 decisions that have political impact.

Scalia appears to be the major enforcer of political allegiance to the Federalist Society and the Koch brothers. The man is so dangerously ideological that he even declared, in a dissenting opinion, that there is nothing in the Constitution to prevent an innocent person from being executed. He argued that, "this Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is actually innocent."

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http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13417

David Swanson - The Statues in Our Public Spaces Lie

There are lies of omission as well as commission, and the statues in Charlottesville, Va. -- typical of other towns -- do both.  We have statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, a generic Confederate soldier, George Rogers Clark, Lewis and Clark (with Sacagawea kneeling like their dog), and on City Hall a triptych with Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  We have a monument to the War on Vietnam.  And that's it.

Here are some things not memorialized in any major statue or monument in Charlottesville: Queen Charlotte, for whom the town is named; any individual or generic native member of the people who lived here before the Europeans; any individual or generic settler or farmer or merchant or slave.  There is no commemoration of the genocide of the native races or the enslavement of Africans.  There is no individual or generic recognition of those who struggled against and ended slavery, those who advanced human rights following the Civil War, or those who took great risks to end Jim Crow.  There is no individual or generic recognition of those who struggled for labor rights, children's rights, women's suffrage, environmental protection, educational advancements, or peace.  There is no recognition of police officers, firefighters, or of those who have pioneered the nonviolent tools that during the past century have proved so much more useful than wars in changing the world for the better.  Charlottesville is a university town that has been home to brilliant and influential educators, authors, artists, scientists, and athletes.  They are not recognized individually or generically.  There is no park and statue for Edgar Allen Poe or William Faulkner.  Mary Chapin Carpenter and the Dave Matthews Band and many others have made music that enriched a lot of lives, but none of them apparently have ended enough lives through violence to get themselves so much as a little plaque.  Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange and many other wonderful performers have either lived too recently or failed to slaughter enough Indians.

Read More:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Statues-in-Our-Public-by-David-Swanson-120329-355.html

Thirty Companies Contribute $41 Million to 524 Members of Congress, Receive $10.6 Billion in Tax Rebates

A new report to be released Wednesday, March 21 by U.S. Public Interest Research Group (U.S. PIRG) and Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) found that thirty unusually aggressive tax dodging corporations have made campaign contributions to 524 (98 percent) sitting members of Congress, and disproportionately to the leadership of both parties and to key committee members. The report, "Loopholes for Sale: Campaign Contributions by Corporate Tax Dodgers," examines campaign contributions made by a total of 280 profitable Fortune 500 companies in 2006, 2008, 2010 and to date in 2012, and is available at http://www.uspirg.org/reports/usp/loopholes-sale.

Loopholes for Sale focuses on campaign contributions by 30 companies – dubbed the “Dirty Thirty” – that a previous U.S. PIRG/CTJ study found collectively paid no federal corporate income taxes between 2008 and 2010 while receiving $10.6 billion in tax rebates and spending millions to lobby Congress. Altogether, these companies spent $41 million on campaign contributions during the four most recent election cycles, with each member of Congress receiving $58,000 on average (top recipients and donors listed below).

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2012/03/21-3

Jim Garrison - Martial Law by Executive Order

President Obama's National Defense Resources Preparedness Executive Order of March 16 does to the country as a whole what the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act did to the Constitution in particular -- completely eviscerates any due process or judicial oversight for any action by the Government deemed in the interest of "national security." Like the NDAA, the new Executive Order puts the government completely above the law, which, in a democracy, is never supposed to happen. The United States is essentially now under martial law without the exigencies of a national emergency.

Even as the 2012 NDAA was rooted in the Patriot Act and the various executive orders and Congressional bills that ensued to broaden executive power in the "war on terror," so the new Executive Order is rooted in the Defense Production Act of 1950 which gave the Government powers to mobilize national resources in the event of national emergencies, except now virtually every aspect of American life falls under ultimate unchallengeable government control, to be exercised by the president and his secretaries at their discretion.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-garrison/martial-law-under-another_b_1370819.html?utm_source=Update+from+Jim+Garrison&utm_campaign=Reminder+re+Mar+2012+Chartres+Call&utm_medium=email

Pam Martens - Wake Up Congress; Before the Next Collapse

In the last decade, Wall Street has evolved from predator to organized crime with a speed dial to Washington.  Instead of Washington reforming Wall Street, it has seduced and corrupted Washington.  It didn’t have to come to this.

Since at least 1989, incredibly talented, hardworking men and women have been leaving high paying positions at major Wall Street institutions and alerting the public in meticulously crafted, first-hand narratives released by venerable publishing houses that Wall Street wants to rip off its clients’ faces.

On Wednesday, March 14, Greg Smith – following in the proud lineage of Micheal Lewis, Frank Partnoy and Nomi Prins – simply bypassed the tedious route of galleys and nit-picking editors  and went straight to the OpEd page of the New York Times with his resignation letter decrying Goldman Sachs for abusing its clients.  “It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as ‘muppets,’ sometimes over internal e-mail,” Smith said. He called the current environment at Goldman “as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.”

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http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/03/19/goldman-sachs-trader-finds-a-new-occupy-tactic/print

Robert Scheer - Dennis Kucinich: Conscience of the Congress

“Dennis will be back, you can count on it; he’s on the right side of things.” I recall those words from a printer in Cleveland who had rented Dennis Kucinich a room in the back of her plant when that city’s former “boy mayor” was living in suddenly reduced circumstances. He was as sanguine then as he was Tuesday night when I spoke with him by phone about his gerrymandered eviction from the U.S. House of Representatives. Although he had just lost the position he has held for eight terms, by the end of our conversation he was optimistic and promised to continue the fight: “I am not about to abandon what I stand for.”

Most of the newly drawn district was made up of the Toledo home base of the fellow Democrat who defeated Kucinich in Tuesday’s primary, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, his more conservative colleague in Ohio’s congressional delegation. What remained of his Cleveland base, which he carried by 75 percent, was not sufficient to stave off the defeat the Republican-controlled state Legislature had intended when it drew the new boundaries in response to Ohio’s loss of two House seats. Kucinich knew it would be a tough primary fight, especially in the face of unexpected attack ads from his former friend in Congress.

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/dennis_kucinich_conscience_of_the_congress_20120308/

Michael Winship - Banks and Congress Grapple with Stubborn, Stupid Facts

Facts are stubborn things, said founding father John Adams, a basic truth Ronald Reagan famously mangled at the Republican National Convention in 1988, when he tried to quote Adams and declared, “Facts are stupid things,” before correcting himself.

Nonetheless, in practice, certain financial and political leaders seem to embrace Reagan’s verbal misstep as closer to reality than Adams’ original aphorism. Witness the resistance on the part of banking institutions and certain members of the congressional leadership, despite regulations demanding that they allow facts and figures to be reported, information that could keep us from the edge of yet another economic meltdown.

The March 5 Wall Street Journal reported that as the Federal Reserve prepares to release the results of the latest round of stress tests, evaluating how banks would respond in the event of another severe financial crisis, “Bankers are pressing the Fed to limit its release of information — expected as early as next week — to what was published after the first test of big banks in 2009.”

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/03/06-6