THE WALL STREET JOURNAL– Last year, I was at a billionaire’s home in California and I asked him to describe his biggest worry. He pointed to a 19^th century painting on the wall, which depicted a female beggar receiving alms from a wealthy gentleman and giving her patron a flower in return.

“That’s what I worry about,” he said. “But instead of flowers, she’s got guns. Violence in the streets, aimed at the wealthy. That’s what I worry about.”

It turns out he wasn’t alone. A new survey from Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today.

Fully 90% of respondents have a negative view of the current global economic climate and 41% say they have little or no faith that the U.S. will be able to right itself in this fiscal climate.

More than a third said security concerns have negatively affected business or investment plans.

Read more about Why the Rich Fear Violence in the Streets

© 2011 The Wall Street Journal

Photo by Flickr user the euskadi 11

GUARDIAN– Worried about the influence of money in American politics, the huge cash payouts that the US supreme court waved through by its Citizens United decision – the decision that lifted most limits on election campaign spending? Corporations are having their way with American elections just as they’ve already had their way with our media.

But at least we have the courts, right?

Wrong. The third branch of government’s in trouble, too. In fact, access to justice – like access to elected office, let alone a pundit’s perch – is becoming a perk just for the rich and powerful.

Take the young woman now testifying in court in Texas. Jamie Leigh Jones claims she was drugged and gang-raped while working for military contractor KBR in Iraq (at the time, a division of Halliburton). Jones, now 26, was on her fourth day in post in Baghdad in 2005 when she says she was assaulted by seven contractors and held captive, under armed guard by two KBR police, in a shipping container.

When the criminal courts failed to act, her lawyers filed a civil suit, only to be met with Halliburton’s response that all her claims were to be decided in arbitration – because she’d signed away her rights to bring the company to court when she signed her employment contract. As Leigh testified before Congress, in October 2009, “I had signed away my right to a jury trial at the age of 20 and without the advice of counsel.” It was a matter of sign or resign. “I had no idea that the clause was part of the contract, what the clause actually meant,” testified Jones.

You’ve probably done the very same thing without even knowing it. When it comes to consumer claims, mandatory arbitration is the new normal. According to research by Public Citizen and others, corporations are inserting “forced arbitration” clauses into the fine print of contracts for work, for cell phone service, for credit cards, even nursing home contracts, requiring clients to give up their right to sue if they are harmed. Arbitration is a no-judge, no-jury, no-appeal world, where arbitrators are (often by contract) selected by the company and all decisions are private – and final. 

They don’t pay fair wages; they don’t pay their fare share of taxes. They evade liability. What gives? Says Saladoff: “When corporations harm, there should be some way to hold them accountable.”

Read more about How Corporations Award Themselves Legal Immunity

Written by Laura Flanders

© 2011 Guardian

Photo by Flickr user tommyajohansson

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ROLLING STONE– Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and, as you consider the career and future presidential prospects of an incredible American phenomenon named Michele Bachmann, do one more thing. Don’t laugh.

It may be the hardest thing you ever do, for Michele Bachmann is almost certainly the funniest thing that has ever happened to American presidential politics. Fans of obscure 1970s television may remember a short-lived children’s show called Far Out Space Nuts, in which a pair of dimwitted NASA repairmen, one of whom is played by Bob (Gilligan) Denver, accidentally send themselves into space by pressing “launch” instead of “lunch” inside a capsule they were fixing at Cape Canaveral. This plot device roughly approximates the political and cultural mechanism that is sending Michele Bachmann hurtling in the direction of the Oval Office.

Bachmann is a religious zealot whose brain is a raging electrical storm of divine visions and paranoid delusions. She believes that the Chinese are plotting to replace the dollar bill, that light bulbs are killing our dogs and cats, and that God personally chose her to become both an IRS attorney who would spend years hounding taxpayers and a raging anti-tax Tea Party crusader against big government. She kicked off her unofficial presidential campaign in New Hampshire, by mistakenly declaring it the birthplace of the American Revolution. “It’s your state that fired the shot that was heard around the world!” she gushed. “You are the state of Lexington and Concord, you started the battle for liberty right here in your backyard.”

Read full article about Michele Bachmann’s Holy War.

© 2011 Rolling Stone Magazine

Photo by Flickr user Gage Skidmore

GUARDIAN– This week, I am sponsoring legislation in the United States Congress that will end US military involvement in Libya for the following reasons:

First, the war is illegal under the United States constitution and our War Powers Act, because only the US Congress has the authority to declare war and the president has been unable to show that the US faced an imminent threat from Libya. The president even ignored his top legal advisers at the Pentagon and the department of justice who insisted he needed congressional approval before bombing Libya.

Second, the war has reached a stalemate and is unwinnable without the deployment of Nato ground troops, effectively an invasion of Libya. The whole operation was terribly ill-considered from the beginning. While Nato supports the Benghazi-based opposition (situated in the oil-rich north-east), there is little evidence that the opposition has support of the majority of Libyans. The leading opposition group, the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (which had reportedly been backed by the CIA in the 1980s), should never have launched an armed civil war against the government if they had no chance absent a massive Nato air campaign and the introduction of Nato troops. Their reckless actions, encouraged by western political, military and intelligence interests, created the humanitarian crisis that was then used to justify the Nato war campaign.

Third, the United States cannot afford it. The US cost of the mission is projected to soon reach more than $1bn, and we are already engaged in massive cutbacks of civil services for our own people.

It is not surprising that a majority of Republicans, Democrats and independents alike think the US should not be involved in Libya.

Read full article about US Must End Illegal War in Libya Now.

Written by Dennis Kucinich

© 2011 Guardian

Photo by Flickr user BRQ Network

COMMON DREAMS– Just when we thought Massey Energy’s Upper Big Branch (in Montcoal, West Virginia) mining disaster of April 5, 2010, which killed 29 coal miners, couldn’t elicit any more tears or regrets or disgust or outrage, we find out how wrong we were.

Even after an independent investigation commissioned by the state’s former governor reported (on May 19, 2011) that the accident had been the clear result of safety violations, even after we learned that Massey had been cited for more than 1300 safety violations in the five years leading up to the explosion, and even after we concluded, bitterly, that Massey was guilty of wanton carelessness and recklessness—we find that we had aimed way too low.

It turns out that Massey executives were not only negligent, they were calculatingly criminal. On June 28, federal investigators announced they had discovered that Massey Energy was keeping two sets of books (safety logs). One log reflected actual mine conditions, which, alas, were demonstrably unsafe, and the other log was a fictionalized showpiece, a veritable Potemkin village, used to mislead government safety inspectors.

Maybe our first order of business should be to change the nomenclature. Given that Massey knew of the unsafe conditions and not only failed to address them, but attempted to conceal them from the very inspectors whose job it was to protect the miners from injury, we should no longer refer to the Big Branch explosion as an accident, disaster or tragedy. We should refer to it as “manslaughter.”

Read full article about When Greed Leads To Manslaughter–Massey Energy.

© 2011 Common Dreams

Photo by Flickr user Talk Media News