WASHINGTON – Tim Alberta reports for National Journal that the “Republican Study Committee [RSC]—a group of 172 conservative House members—has barred Heritage Foundation employees from attending its weekly meeting in the Capitol.” Heritage, a fiscally conservative Washington think-tank, has traditionally been involved in the closed-door meetings but no longer.
Through the summer, Heritage insisted that a relatively popular program, commonly known as “food stamps,” be voted on separately from subsidies to big agrobusiness.
In July, Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage arm Heritage Action, released a statement to that effect. It read, “The purpose of ending the unholy alliance that has dominated the food stamp and farm bill for decades is to allow substantive debate that would allow the House to show its conservative values. Also, Needham warned the RSC against “subsidies and government intervention that will continue to harm consumers and taxpayers alike.”
You can read more here about how powerful Republican Party politicians are in league against conservatives and with powerful farming special interests.
Nation Editor Barbara Ehrenreich said the Government’s Message to the Poor is ‘Die’
WASHINGTON – Barbara Ehrenreich, contributing editor at The Nation, suggested on August 15 that the government’s message to poor people is essentially to “die.” Asked by The Internet Chronicle about the roots of New York City’s stop-and-frisk program, Ehrenreich alluded to a Michigan woman’s struggle to escape a 30-day prison sentence for being unable to pay for a son’s incarceration. Ehrenreich was speaking at the Lamont Street Collective.
“There’s a punitive mentality in this country,” said Ehrenreich, “that is not entirely sane.”
New York City Police have a long-standing policy of halting, interrogating, and searching pedestrians – judicial critics have said, without probable cause. In an August 12 decision, federal District Judge Shira Scheindlin rejected the city’s stop-and-frisk policy, saying that it amounted to “indirect racial profiling.” The vast majority of those stopped in 2012 alone were black or Hispanic.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has defended the policy. And Tuesday, city attorneys sent a letter to Scheindlin citing statistics that use of the policy had declined by more than half over a year.
According to a statement by the American Civil Liberties Union, Edwina Nowlin, a Detroit, Michigan native, served 28 days of her sentence before the organization’s having successfully interceded.
Ehrenreich, the New York Times bestselling author of “Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America” blamed the rise of New York City’s financial sector in the 1980s and 1990s for the persecution of the poor. “Gentrification,” she said, has become rationale for targeting the impoverished.
Said Ehrenreich, Nowlin “was picked up by the cops on the street and charged with not only the usual homeless crime of being in the street and so forth but with failing to pay for her son’s – 16-year-old son’s – room and board in jail … So [Nowlin] gets picked up and she gets put in jail for that. Then she gets a paycheck. She thinks it can be applied to her son’s room and board, but no, it’s immediately confiscated for her room and board in jail.”
Added Ehrenreich, “Now, what is going on here? What are they thinking? I mean, the message to people who don’t have money is, ‘die;’ you know, just be dead; be gone.”
Ehrenreich also said that the mass incarceration of the poor – the design, she claims, of the Bloomberg administration’s embrace of stop-and-frisk – initiated under the aegis of beautification.
At the close of her talk, she said that her opposition to stop-and-frisk not due to its enforcement being racist but because police should not have grounds to randomly halt and interrogate innocent individuals whatsoever.
The author’s comments on August 15 are in the video below:
Domestic Extremists: Al Jazeera America’s Coverage is Covering up the Truth about Syria
WASHINGTON – As a full-scale NATO offensive against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad looms, the Obama administration’s Commerce Department is ensuring that Americans have full access to accurate information about the upcoming struggle. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said Tuesday that any Americans attempting to Web-stream Al Jazeera English, as opposed to Al Jazeera America, would face felony charges.
In an on-the-record teleconference Tuesday Sec. Penny Pritzker said, “Al Jazeera America is the go-to source for Americans interested in news about the conflict. In a time of war, it’s time for Americans to unify around one story and one nation.”
State Public Affairs Undersecretary Tara Sonenshine joined Sec. Pritzker on the call, and added what she described as “much-needed” context to State Secretary Hillary Clinton’s Spring 2011 advisement that Al Jazeera English had proven the “real news.”
It was then, in the midst of the Arab spring, that Sec. Clinton said, “Al Jazeera has been the leader in … literally changing people’s minds and attitudes” and that it had been “really effective.”
Ms. Sonenshine addressed complaints by disloyal Al Jazeera staff, published in Lebanon’s Al Akhbar, that Al Jazeera had become oblivious to suffering allegedly caused at the hands of the Free Syrian Army’s freedom fighters.
Screenshot: Al Jazeera English, Inappropriate for Americans
Ms Sec. Sonenshine said, “Unfortunately, frivolous public statements by violators of NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] have compromised what remains an interest in global awareness and the free flow of information.”
The high-level officials’ comments echo a Commerce Department position articulated last month. A department Green Paper made clear the administration’s position that Congress should “enact legislation adopting the same range of penalties for criminal streaming of copyrighted works as now exists for criminal reproduction and distribution.” As the liberation of Syria has become more certain, Congress has acted to ensure that violators of intellectual property rights are delivered justice.
“Would-be offenders,” said Ms. Sonenshine, “should understand our commitment to protecting the innovation of all of our global partners, including Al Jazeera America. I want the international community to understand we take our IP [intellectual property] obligations as seriously as ever.”
Al Jazeera provided what the state secretary regarded as “cutting-edge” coverage of the Arab Spring. Since then, the Qatar-based news service has launched a new channel, Al Jazeera America, tailored especially to the interests and – said Undersecretary Sonenshine – self-interests of middle-class Americans.
Sec. Pritzer cited her concern that citizens might become “confused” about the United States’ and al-Qaeda’s new, mutual front against the barbarism of the Assad regime. Al-Qaeda, a Salafist and Wahhabist group slandered throughout the Gulf, is now on the front lines against the Syrian evildoers.
“While Americans have every right to feel misgivings over al-Qaeda’s role in perpetrating the 9/11 attacks,” said Sec. Pritzker, “it is far more important, for national security, for them to now remember the plight of Syrians suffering from the Assad regime’s morally obscene deployment of weapons of mass destruction.” Added Pritzer, “The agenda of freedom in the Middle East is larger than any given sect or clique. We can’t kowtow to domestic extremists bent on enforcing their grudges on the rest of civil society.”
