Mar 31 2009
Thousands have been killed in Mexico’s ongoing drug war, and some are suggesting that the best way to stop the violence is to legalize drugs.
What do you think? It is time to legalize marijuana, or would that create more problems?
Summarize your argument for or against legalizing marijuana in one minute or less. Your video could be featured on CNN.
Mar 31 2009
NEW YORK (CNN) — Here’s something to think about:
How many police officers and sheriff’s deputies are involved in investigating and solving crimes involving illegal drugs? And arresting and transporting and interrogating and jailing the suspects?
How many prosecutors and their staffs spend time prosecuting drug cases? How many defense lawyers spend their time defending drug suspects?
How many hours of courtroom time are devoted to drug trials? How many judges, bailiffs, courtroom security officers, stenographers, etc., spend their time on drug trials?
How many prison cells are filled with drug offenders? And how many corrections officers does it take to guard them? How much food do these convicts consume?
Mar 29 2009
This film captures the lower East Side of New York City, and challenges the police state when it comes to exercising the right to free speech.
Mar 29 2009
March 25th, 2009 · 12 Comments
By Carlos Miller
The headline in today’s New York Times’ article sums up perfectly why so many cops feel threatened by photographers: When Evidence From Surveillance Cameras Leads to Charges Against Officers.
The article highlights several cases where police officers ended up facing criminal charges for lies exposed on video cameras, either though surveillance cameras or citizen videos. A couple of the incidents have been reported on this blog.
Mar 29 2009
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: March 25, 2009
Surveillance cameras have captured the faces of criminal suspects in banks, in elevators and on street corners. But they have also surfaced in an unexpected law enforcement role: as evidence against police officers accused of misconduct or of lying on the witness stand.
The latest such case emerged on Monday, when a New York City detective, Debra Eager, 41, was indicted on three felony perjury charges after her testimony before a grand jury about a 2007 drug arrest “starkly contradicted” video surveillance of the event, according to Robert T. Johnson, the Bronx district attorney.
Detective Eager pleaded not guilty to the charges, said her lawyer, Peter E. Brill, who pointed out that she had 15 years’ experience on the force and no disciplinary history. He explained the discrepancies between her testimony and the video as honest mistakes.
Mar 28 2009
by Cenk Uygur
Fri Mar 27, 2009 at 09:48:08 AM PDT
The size of our national economy this year is roughly $15 trillion. The size of the Credit Default Swaps (CDS) market is $64 trillion. The whole world GDP is about $56 trillion. How could the CDS market be larger than the world GDP combined? That doesn’t make any sense.
The minute I read that many months ago, I realized that there was something unreal going on in the CDS market. By “unreal” I mean something that is given value even though it is not attached to real assets. And the more I researched, the more I realized that was true.
Mar 22 2009
Especially look at the chart titled: “How this Bear Market Compares by The New York Times” This is a dynamic chart, so it is updated regularly
Mar 21 2009
The Big Takeover
The global economic crisis isn’t about money – it’s about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution
MATT TAIBBIPosted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM
It’s over — we’re officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country’s heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.
The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That’s $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG’s 2008 losses).
So it’s time to admit it: We’re fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we’re still in denial
Mar 21 2009
U.N. panel says world should ditch dollar
Wed Mar 18, 2009 11:16am EDT By Jeremy Gaunt, European Investment Correspondent
LUXEMBOURG (Reuters) – A U.N. panel will next week recommend that the world ditch the dollar as its reserve currency in favor of a shared basket of currencies, a member of the panel said on Wednesday, adding to pressure on the dollar.
Currency specialist Avinash Persaud, a member of the panel of experts, told a Reuters Funds Summit in Luxembourg that the proposal was to create something like the old Ecu, or European currency unit, that was a hard-traded, weighted basket.