You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (66)

PLAYS: (268)

From Lou Dobbs Tonight, the Face Off Segment with The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill, the Council on Foreign Relations’ neoconservative Max Boot and the World Policy Institute’s Patrica DeGennaro. The topic was our troop levels in Afghanistan. Scahill did a great job when he was allowed to talk, which Dobbs made sure to keep to a minimum.

DOBBS: President Obama today congratulated Afghanistan's President Karzai on his election victory. The president, President Obama, is still weighing his choices for forces in Afghanistan. The strategy for those forces. That is the subject of our face-off debate.

Joining me now is Jeremy Scahill. He's journalist and fellow at the Nation Institute. Good to have you with us. Patricia Degennaro, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute. Good to have you with us. Max Boot, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Thank you for being with us. Good to see you again.

Let's turn to, first, what happened here? Last week, there was going to be a delay as we had a -- all of that nasty fraud in the election. There had to be a runoff on the 7th of November. Suddenly, now, in the 2nd of November, the president sort of blesses Karzai and says we're done just because his opponent withdrew.

MAX BOOT: I think Abdullah Abdullah realized he would lose the runoff election, just as he had lost the initial election. And the reality is, there was fraud. There was a lot of fraud. Hamid Karzai's still the most popular politician in Afghanistan. He still has a lot of legitimacy, especially amongst the Pashtuns where the insurgency is based. And I think we've been focusing too much on the election because the people I spoke to in Afghanistan when I was just there were more concerned about what their government is delivering for them, rather than how it was selected. I think there's still a good opportunity to work with Hamid Karzai, work with the governors, to increase the kind of governing capacity that Afghanistan has to defeat the Taliban --

DOBBS: You're not saying corruption be damned, give the people what they want and they'll be fine?

Continue reading »

From The Daily Show:

Al Franken proposes getting rid of the old "it's OK if you get raped" clause in government contracts, but 30 Republicans object.

You can view this video right here by getting the latest version of Flash Player!

DOWNLOADS: (1386)

PLAYS: (4126)

Rachel Maddow with the second half of her report on the political witch hunt of ACORN and the problems that the De-Fund ACORN Act is going to bring for private war contractors if it actually passes.

As Rachel notes the De-Fund ACORN Act has a bill of attainder problem. The Constitution prohibits the legislature from enacting bills of attainder, which means the De-Fund ACORN Act must also include "any company that's ever been indicted for breaking campaign finance laws, or that's ever filed fraudulent paperwork with any federal agency". That means a good deal of our military contractors are going to be swept up under the law as well and it cannot only be enforced against ACORN.

Rachel reads off a list of all of the military contractors that would have their funding cut off and goes into the list of other crimes like murder, prostitution and contract fraud that they have committed as well which pale in comparison to what ACORN has been accused of.

Jeremy Scahill is asked whether the war contractors are worried about this law touching them. His answer. "Hell no." It's all about politics and too many in Congress are bought and sold by our military industries. And as he notes, ACORN got pennies when compared the massive sums of money these private contractors received.

Continue reading »

Part 1

Part 2

From Bill Moyers Journal:

From a billion dollars sought for embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan to May's highest casualties for US forces in Iraq since September, the wars abroad are taking their toll on our nation. Bill Moyers sits down with award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill to examine the human and financial costs of America's wars.

This didn't air here, so I didn't get a chance to record it, but someone else put it up at You Tube. Well worth the watch. Scahill has done some wonderful investigative reporting and has not allowed a change in administrations to keep him from pushing back against U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and the use of private contractors to fight our wars for us.

As Scahill notes, President Obama inherited a huge mess, and he's no George Bush. That does not mean that he should be given a pass on escalating our military presence in Afghanistan and on the continued and dangerous reliance on these contractors who are fighting wars for profit.

Full transcript below the fold.

Continue reading »

A few years ago, one of the things the SEIU's Andy Stern talked about was moving away from employer-based health insurance and allowing contract workers to purchase insurance through their union. I thought that was a pretty good idea. It would be one way to help people like this:

Over the past decade, U.S. businesses increasingly have relied on contract workers as a way to keep a lid on health care and retirement benefit costs and to give them more flexibility to adjust payrolls as conditions change. Now, with the American economy flashing code red, companies from Wall Street to Silicon Valley are casting off temporary workers and freelancers left and right, typically without any severance pay.

While the ability to shed contingent workers helps protect corporate profits, economists say it's a net negative for the economy. That's because while companies may save on labor costs, they aren't likely to use those savings to boost investment with the economy so weak, preferring instead to rebuild their balance sheets.

Meanwhile, the people who lose their jobs will be forced to cut spending drastically, particularly because many of them earn below-average pay and thus have little savings to fall back on. The overall result is a decrease in demand, further depressing the economy. Says Dimitri B. Papadimitriou, president of the Levy Economics Institute of Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y.: "Clearly there is a macroeconomic impact. It begs the question of what our social safety net is all about."

[...] Here in the U.S., the cutbacks of temporary workers mean the labor market is in much worse shape than the headline 8.5 percent jobless figure for March would suggest. Throw in part-timers who would like to work more and unemployed workers who have given up their job search, and you come up with a jobless rate closer to 15.6 percent, according to one measure buried in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly Employment Situation report.

"The numbers are astounding," says Beth Shulman, an analyst with the Russell Sage Foundation, a New York-based social science research group. "These workers, often at the lower end of the pay scale, are losing hours, income, and benefits. That only worsens the recession."

NiemanWatchDog:

Her son is on his second deployment in Iraq, where his military camp recently burned to the ground as a result of an electrical fire. Mary Hornig thinks journalists should be asking if anyone is going to do anything about shoddy contracting - and whether there is any limit to what will be asked of the armed forces.

Q. Who has responsibility for shoddy contracting resulting in electrocutions and fires on military sites in Iraq? Where is the accountability? Why are our servicemen and women risking injury and dying in showers and housing units in Iraq?
Q. Will Halliburton contractors continue to be awarded electrical contracts based on past sub-par performance?

Q. Will military personnel be compensated for their losses resulting from electrical fires and if so, at what percentage of their losses?

Read on

Supporting the troops is just another Republican talking point.