“ALL THE EXCITEMENT OF COMIC BOOKS WITH A LOT MORE SUBSTANCE”
-Tome Tender
“DOES NOT DISAPPOINT!”
-Author Brittany Seguin
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“IT’S THE HUNGER GAMES MEETS THE WALKING DEAD!”
-Anime Reporter
“THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING!”
-Reading My Reality
One of the requests to Congress would allow the department to petition a judge to indefinitely detain someone during an emergency.
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.
This bill creates a situation where Internet users could easily be on the hook for multiple $5,000 copyright infringement judgments without many of the traditional legal safeguards or rights of appeal our justice system provides.
Even the Washington Post (which I do not generally trust) is starting to shit itself in the face of blatant fascism.
The First Amendment is meaningless if it only protects people the government recognizes as journalists
This thread discusses what the government’s case is. It centers on allegedly trying to help Manning crack a password.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
“In late October PEN America filed suit against President Donald Trump arguing that his threats and use of the machinery of government to exact reprisals against journalists and media organizations violate the First Amendment. We specifically cited his threats to withdraw press credentials from reporters based on critical questions and stories as a prime example of this behavior. Regrettably, last night yet again the White House demonstrated precisely the pattern our lawsuit documents. The White House’s withdrawal of the press credentials of CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta was in clear retaliation for Acosta’s persistent questioning of the President on topics he did not wish to address during a press conference yesterday afternoon. The rescission of Acosta’s credentials, accompanied by a demonstrably false account by White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders of the actions that led to the withdrawal, are yet more evidence that the President and the administration feel no compunction about exacting punishment on journalists for hard-hitting coverage. The First Amendment protects our press from having to operate under the cloud of such intimidation and threatened reprisal. Our lawsuit is an effort to affirm that fundamental principle, and ensure that no one—not even the President of the United States—is given free rein to violate the Constitution.”
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PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible. pen.org
CONTACT: Anoosh Gasparian, External Relations Manager: agasparian@pen.org
by Joe Giambrone
The freedom of corporate shareholders to fire your ass and move your job to anywhere that pays less, that’s one of them. We’re going to keep it real now, okay?
Each year on July 4th, the working classes of America drink themselves into stupors and play with innocuous explosives in their driveways. To them, this is some kind of representation of “freedom.” Yes, they can blow up paper cylinders; what they cannot blow up is the system that holds them as wage slaves. Say “no” to your boss, and you are economically destroyed. Not so “free” at work it turns out.
America has a twisted, immoral relationship with the word “freedom.” Each war of the modern age has been disguised, inside mountains of propaganda, as an effort to bring so-called “freedom” to somebody somewhere. If they didn’t ask for it, well, that’s no concern.
Freedom is good because we say it is. We liberate a lot of oil and mineral wealth, which needs to break free and become corporate profit. That’s the kind of freedom that launches the Marines or the Special Forces to invade your land. This “freedom” is not a freedom for your people and their human rights, but the freedom of US big money investors to plunder your land’s resources.
This is proven beyond any reasonable doubt, in 2003, by Paul Bremer’s “100 Orders” of the occupying United States. These illegal “Orders” dismantled the entire government of Iraq and wrote in numerous rights for foreign investors. The entire enterprise remains an illegal war of aggression, and the profit motive of the invaders stands as evidence:
“Bremer implemented his “100 Orders” with the force of law, all but a handful of which remain in place today. As the preamble to many of the orders state, they are intended to “transition [Iraq] from a … centrally planned economy to a market economy” virtually overnight and by U.S. fiat.
Bremer’s orders included firing the entire Iraqi military–some half a million men–in the first weeks of the occupation. Suddenly jobless, many of these men took their guns with them and joined the violent insurgency. Bremer also fired 120,000 of Iraq’s senior bureaucrats from every government ministry, hospital and school. His laws allowed for the privatization of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises (excluding oil) and for American companies to receive preferential treatment over Iraqis in the awarding of reconstruction contracts. The laws reduced taxes on all corporations by 25 percent and opened every sector of the Iraqi economy to private foreign investment. The laws allowed foreign firms to own 100 percent of Iraqi businesses (as opposed to partnering with Iraqi firms) and to send their profits home without having to invest a cent in the struggling Iraqi economy. Iraqi laws governing banking, foreign investment, patents, copyrights, business ownership, taxes, the media, agriculture and trade were all changed to conform to U.S. goals.”
-Spoils of War, In These Times
That’s the definition of “freedom,” literally, as George W. Bush told us so. That was why he launched the war. That is what he did to the nation of Iraq once it was defeated.
So, clearly, there are different types of freedom. There is what the prisoner yearns for, and there is what the CEO bribes politicians for. Do not confuse them, as that is how propaganda turns freedom to slavery, peace to war, intelligence to idiocy.
Corporate CEOs in the Trump era are stockpiling freedom too. They want freedom to destroy unions, thus disempowering their workers further. They want the freedom to pollute the air and water more than it is already polluted. They want the freedom to keep all the profits for themselves and externalize all the costs onto the lower classes. They even want the freedom to steal American’s Social Security trust fund.
Criminals absolutely love freedom, as it gives them a window of opportunity to pounce.
This July 4th watch the words. Watch your ass.
Over on the Senate side, things were even more ridiculous. Senator Jeff Flake voted for cloture, helping to end (the already non-existing) debate on such surveillance, and blocking any amendments. And then, the very next morning, went on the Senate floor to slam the President, compare him to Stalin, and warn that our democracy may not survive. Again, this was mere hours after Senator Flake voted to give more surveillance powers to the President he was about to compare to Stalin.
Or how about Dianne Feinstein? It may be no surprise that Feinstein voted to continue and expand surveillance — she has a long history of doing exactly that. But just about an hour before voting for cloture, Feinstein herself introduced an amendment that would have required a warrant to search the corpus of data collected under 702. And then she voted to block that amendment from even being voted on.
…Trump has been loudly denouncing McCaskill for months as she’s facing a tough reelection campaign. And her response was to deny any further debate or amendments and to vote to give Trump more surveillance powers.
…These are not the only ones.
