This could be seen as hypocritical, because here are four ‘old white men’ holding up funding to a program that serves a predominately minority constituency of CHILDREN, while these same four ‘old white men’ are NOT PUSHING FOR REFORM on the hundred million dollar bonuses of their ‘old white men’ Wall Street buddies.
Chuck Grassley, R-IA, Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla, Jon Kyl R-AZ and John Cornyn, R-TX have joined together to block further federal funding of Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Roxanne Spillett, president and CEO of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, received a total compensation of $988,591 in 2008, according to the charity’s tax filings. She got a base salary of $360,774, a bonus of $150,000 and other compensation of $83,152, for a total of $593,926. She also received $385,500 in deferred compensation, most of which went to a retirement plan, and $9,165 in nontaxable benefits.
the chief executive of a charity that has been closing local clubs for lack of funding was compensated nearly $1 million in 2008. They also questioned why in the same year officials spent $4.3 million on travel, $1.6 million on conferences, conventions and meetings, and $544,000 in lobbying fees.
Hmmm, excessive travel and conference expenses, conventions and meetings and LOBBYING FEES? Sounds like the typical life of a POLITICIAN. What these men do not tell you is how many officials were included in that $4.3 million travel spending, whether the $1.6 million spent on conferences were to put on one conference or fifty, and why in all fairness a childrens’ organization NEEDS to spend $544,000 to LOBBY for funding…
Locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and on U.S. military bases around the world
More than 50,000 trained professional staff
Boys and Girls Clubs of America have helped millions of kids across America, including R&B singer, Usher.
From academic failure and gang violence to poverty, drugs and obesity, America’s youth face a daunting array of problems – with serious consequences and fewer safety nets at home and in the community. According to a 2007 BGCA alumni survey conducted by Harris Interactive, 57 percent of alumni reported, “The Club saved my life,” while another 28 percent credited Boys & Girls Clubs with keeping them in school.
“Growing up in the Club, I had the chance to experience a lot of positive things; it helped reinforce the values I learned at home including good character, leadership and giving back to my community, my country and my world,” said Usher. “It’s where I developed my love of singing and performing, received help with my homework, and it’s where I found a safe place to go after school.”
So how do we begin to have constructive change, when the complainers do exactly what they’re trying to stop?
And why do our kids need lobbyists to fight for money that is channeled to Big Banks whose CEOs’ crazy annual incomes are NEVER LIMITED?
How can Americans ask our young men and women to indiscriminately kill a shadowy enemy and then return to their ordered Coca-Cola lives Stateside? “It’s even worse for our troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan,” Hanks says. “At least the Pacific-war soldiers coming back from World War II decompressed on ships for weeks. And then once the troops arrived portside, it was often a long train ride home to Peoria. Today these guys in Afghanistan fight in bloody hell and are flown back in 18 hours. How can they cope with that? How can they suddenly go from Tora Bora to Peyton Place?” Even the legendary Audie Murphy, the most decorated soldier in World War II, suffered posttraumatic stress disorder after his return from the European theater. During one meltdown, a deranged Murphy held his wife hostage at gunpoint.
Recently, an angry Ft. Stewart soldier, Spc. Marc A. Hall, wrote a rap song about his rage at having been ’stop lossed’, forced again and again to re-enlist into dangerous war zones even though his contracted time in service had expired. In the song, he describes revenge and vengeful acts on his Commanding Officers for betraying him and forcing him back into combat.
It turns out that writing about your rage, or your sorrow, or fear, or brokenness actually helps you PROCESS the unthinkable things you might have seen or done in wartime. Author Maxine Hong Kingston has a writers group for US soldiers that has been helpful in their re-entry into their home environments. An anthology, Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace was published with these writings.
Drugs and addiction account for a significant percentage of veterans’ crimes: nearly half of vets in federal prison, for example, are locked up on drug charges. Fully 61% of veteran prisoners are dependent on or abuse alcohol or drugs. Meanwhile, cases of post-traumatic stress disorder — many left untreated — only compound the problem.
The Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America organization’s tagline is ‘For America’s Newest Generation of Veterans and the People Who Support Them’. They offer a hand to help veterans re-acclimate to their families and their jobs and their lives.
We need to UN-BOOT CAMP our brave men and women in the Military, especially if the Military will not do so.
Does no one think about the implications of these ‘parties’???
The mercenary firm formerly known as Blackwater, now Xe, funded by right wing evangelicals, is accused of taking WEAPONS from the US Military and Afghan Police forces,
Eric Prince, who runs Xe, has a security division, a fleet of private planes, he’s got Bush’s former head of Counter Terrorism, the man who was charged with finding Bin Laden and failed to do so and is now running a private CIA Total Intelligence Solutions for Xe. Blackwater is implicated in the murders of Iraqi citizens, (they LOST THEIR LICENSE to operate in Iraq), in gun running, has been paid billions for its private army around the world and is considered ‘armed and dangerous’, supposedly outside the legal protection of the US military. 2/3 of their contracts with the US Government are ‘no-bid’.
According to an RNC fundraising document uncovered on Wednesday, RNC “Young Eagles” — party major donors under 40 — will meet at the facility in the spring.
Its dangerous to national security when one political party parties with the assistance of a troubled private mercenary army.
Students, professors, teachers and unions around the country will organize today to protest America’s imperiled system of education with more than 100 events in 32 states.
The movement started in California, where the public college system has been seized by tension and dissatisfaction over proposed tuition hikes, budget cuts and a series of racist events on University of California and California State campuses.
At the same time that we’re upping their educational costs, think about this:
The founding fathers said that our national debt should be paid off every generation. They said it is immoral to saddle the next generation with debt. Today we are saddling not only the next generation but the next and the next. This is taxation without representation because we are putting our posterity in debt when they are not old enough to vote on it.
Its not exactly fair to make students pay more for the ability to discover the ways in which we’ve betrayed them.
So kids, we won’t educate you, but we’ll sure house you for life!
On this day of protest, let’s give students our support. We’d rather have them smart so they can dig us out of the mess we’re in, so they can provide GOOD FOOD to us when we’re in nursing homes in just a few decades… We’ll be in trouble if they are all uneducated or incarcerated.
Just one question: didn’t the GOP just have 8 years?
Newsweek’s title is: IF THE REPUBLICANS WERE IN CHARGE… Well they got voted out of the majority, and the Presidency. So countering Obama’s agenda might seem like its their job as the opposition party, but its not. When GWB was President, Dems were told to be patriotic and follow their President, which many did. They followed him into a trillion dollar war, trillion dollar deficit and a housing implosion and lobbyist/insurer/banking explosion.
So why, one year in to a Democratic Presidency, are we wondering what the Republicans would do if they were in charge?
We see it every day, the detritus, the lost jobs, the massively increased credit card charges, the $500 million bonuses to bankers who destroyed the world (yes, Goldman Sachs, people still blame you).
Newsweek shows its death knell: NEWS and WEEK are supposed to be going together, not guesstimating what the 8 year veterans have up their sleeve. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the obstructionism, the lack of reform in the financial arena and the refusal to provide Americans with reasonable health care reform.
I tweeted all day yesterday (www.twitter.com/marywallace) during the Healthcare Summit at the White House. A great website, www.sunlightfoundation.com live streamed all day, updating charts next to each speaker with a list of their top career donors! Not surprisingly, many of the Republicans who oppose healthcare reform are fully funded by insurers, banks and lobbyists.
It was shocking to hear man after man after man say, let’s get out a clean piece of paper and start over again. REALLY? After they had done so much work on their own bills? DID THEY BRING CLEAN PIECES OF PAPER TO START WORKING ON THE SPOT? No.
I noticed that the overwhelming majority of Republicans were old white men (I’m talking to you Boehner, even though you’ve got that fake tan going on). In the pockets of the insurance industry and their lobbyists.
But I woke up today to this guy’s face, it looks so shocking in its aged meanness.
Its Jim Bunning, from Kentucky, who single-handedly blocked the Senate from extending unemployment benefits for 1.2 million Americans, while complaining
‘I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9:00,” he said,
“and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beat Kentucky this year.
Meanwhile, the unemployment rate in Kentucky is 10.7 percent. With a population of 4,200,000, that’s over 420,000 unemployed. NOT GOOD.
As I said yesterday on twitter, Americans forced their government to pull out of the Vietnam war when TV images and newspaper images of dying and dead American soldiers inundated American households. We had believed the rhetoric from Washington, but when our own young men and women came home in wheelchairs and body bags, it was the power of the images that turned the tide in the US government’s ability to continue the war.
We are inundated these days with image after image of Congressmen who deny health insurance reform to working Americans (while covered under government plans themselves), who deny childcare to the working poor (while having it available themselves), who send other people’s kids to war while their own drink excessively underage in bars (I’m talking to you, George W. Bush). The images from the bargaining table yesterday were predominantly old, white men. Sure, old white men run the insurance companies and the banks and the lobbying firms. But if you walk around any city in America, you’ll see all different ages and colors and sexes. How did we whittle down our vision of who should represent us in Congress to one color, one age AND one sex? How did that one type of person end up in charge of everything?
Its time for new employment rules: in order to serve in Congress, you have to agree to take 1/2 the $170,000 salary until your state’s poor and homeless and lower class and middle class are stable. The other half? It goes into a fund to counter the lobbying of your beloved insurers and banks. You get no health insurance until all your state’s citizens are covered. Can’t make that work? Then you don’t deserve cadillac coverage yourself. And if you have a daughter or son of military recruitment age? They go to war until no citizen from your state is overseas. That would stop the illegal multiple re-ups that the military is getting away with.
Mischa Barton smoking dope at an intersection in LA? Caught by paparazzi in broad daylight?
pacificcoastnewsonline.com
When I say some Americans are above the law, you think I’m talking about this famous & rich white chick who is ending 3 years probation after a DUI for driving all over the road in 2007. She seems to still be getting away with her blatant, in public, in-your-face breaking the law.
Nope, I’m talking about this guy who broke the War Crimes Act of 1996, a federal statute that makes it a federal crime for any American to violate the Geneva Convention by engaging in murder, torture or inhuman treatment. Anyone who knew about, ordered or failed to take steps to stop torture is guilty under the statute.
And if someone dies while being tortured? Then those who tortured, knew about, ordered or failed to take steps to stop torture are subject to life imprisonment and/or the death penalty…
Why isn’t he in jail? By his own words, he broke this law. He admitted telling the Justice Department to write arguments that waterboarding is legal. (Just as an FYI, remember that the Executive Branch is supposed to be SEPARATE from the Justice Branch, and the Legistlative Branch? That’s supposed to be the basis of the American governmental system, isn’t it?) Telling Justice to cover his ass means that he ordered others to commit illegality, which makes him a war criminal. AND, on TV last week, he defended CIA Operatives and Justice Department stooges who did waterboard, saying they shouldn’t be punished for doing what they were told…
I’m sorry, but the chain-of-command is always responsible for the illegalities they force their underlings to do… That was the point of the Nuremberg Trials. Cheney admits breaking the law, admits he made underlings follow his lead and yet is doing the equivalent of smoking a joint on a public street in front of tons of paparrazi; Cheney just did it on nationwide TV.
18 U.S.C. § 2441 has no statute of limitations, which means that a war crimes complaint can be filed at any time.
The penalty may be life imprisonment or — if a single prisoner dies due to torture — death. Given that there are numerous, documented cases of prisoners being tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in both Iraq and Afghanistan (see for example this report), that means that the death penalty would be appropriate for anyone found guilty of carrying out, ordering, or sanctioning such conduct.
That means that Cheney could be rounded up as a fugitive as long as he is alive, just like those old Nazis you see on the news.
There really should be ‘justice for all’, not just justice for the 2,300,000 Americans who aren’t either rich, famous or powerful enough to game the system…
Is it just me, or does ANYone else notice that the bosses of our Representative Leadership are all old white guys, and that they look just like the guys who got us into this recession, the old white guy bankers?
And are they hard at work, both sides of the aisle working together to pull American taxpayers out of this recession? Are they spanking the bankers? Are they creating jobs?
No, they’re involved in a political death match. WITH EACH OTHER.
First, Sen. Richard Shelby put a blanket hold on all executive branch nominees to extort the executive branch into rigging procurement to guarantee that the company he favored won a bid on a defense contract. Oh, and he wanted the FBI to build a crime lab in his state, too.
And now, Sen. Lindsey Graham is copycatting, placing a hold on the closing of Gitmo hostage to extort the Department of Justice into not having a civilian trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
What are they doing? Holding up the smooth working of the Government of the United States of America? For their own political good? We have 3 branches of Government and all three are being held up by partisan politics in Congress.
They have NO IDEA what regular Americans are going thru right now. Because they can head off to Hawaii to caucus, or dine with lobbyists at expensive restaurants. They don’t have to listen to regular Americans.
They get to play their little power trips, while utterly ignoring the people who elected them.
The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics tallied lobbying income data from tens of thousands of disclosure filings, and the data show that special interests of all stripes spent $3.47 billion lobbying the federal government in 2009, up from $3.3 billion the previous year.
How did the influence industry manage such a banner year despite a battered economy? The simple answer is that the Obama administration’s aggressive change agenda has prompted businesses to open their wallets to an unprecedented degree in the hope of preventing reform.
Washington is paralyzed by snow and partisanship. Nothing is getting done — even as the Great Recession pulls more Americans into its maw.
In the midst of this paralysis, the President was asked about the giant pay packages of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co. ($17 mullion for 2009) and Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs ($9 million). “First of all, I know both those guys,” Obama said. “They’re very savvy businessmen. And I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That’s part of the free market system.”
Free market system? As I remember it, American taxpayers forked out hundreds of billions to keep JPMorgan, Goldman, and other big Wall Street banks afloat through most of 2009. Had we not done so, Dimon, Blankfein, and most other top executives on Wall Street would not have earned a dime last year. In fact, some would be out on the street, reather than sitting pretty on the Street. The free market system has been unleashed instead on average Americans.
Why do 92% of Americans want to kick their Members of Congress to the curb?
If you’re part of the white privilege world, you might not notice something strange about this photo, the cover of Vanity Fair extolling HOLLYWOOD! 2010.
They’re all white! And SUPER SKINNY. Utterly lacking in diversity. They do not represent Hollywood’s future. But Vanity Fair thinks they do!
Hmmm, patrician looks? That’s code for ‘white’. ‘Button nose’? That’s what most plastic surgeries are trying to create, also code for ‘white’. ‘Ivory-soap’? Its a white bar of soap.
Totally lacking creativity, Vanity Fair has missed out on these lovely young women:
Zoe Saldana, from both blockbusters AVATAR and STAR TREK,
and they forgot Gabourey Sidibe from PRECIOUS,
and they forgot Freida Pinto from SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE.
