Congress could end this lawlessness in one day, but the Republicans refuse to hold anyone in this administration accountable. I'm afraid we're stuck until we replace enough Congress members.
ONE person was held accountable. One of the kids for cash judges convicted kids for money ... and didn't pay taxes on the kickbacks. He got convicted for "both" factors, excpept PLENTY of people involved in the convicting kids for cash, including lawmakers, didn't get convicted at all.
One can barely imagine what the punishment would be for a private individual kidnapping >2000 kids for on average 3 months each, with several of those kids committing suicide as a result? Kidnapping, because that's exactly what the state did here. What do you think if you or I did that, the punishment would be? I'm thinking somewhere between consecutive life sentences and death, and 100k+ USD per kid.
The state decided NO punishment, except a short house arrest stint for one of the judges that also didn't pay taxes was enough.
Or take the Flint lead poisoning crisis, and compare civil liability to what the government did when it was the culprit, rather than the benificiary. Compare and contrast:
Private company causes lead poisoning? On average $300,000 USD per victim, paid within 2 years of the poisoning. In some cases people served jail sentences of weeks to months, which isn't much but it's at least not zero.
Government causes lead poisoning? Flint water crisis: On average $2000 USD per victim (though some kids got $100,000, though that didn't cover their medical bills), paid >8 years after the case started. And this is purely based on the flint poisoning crisis, and ignores the many smaller cases the government simply got away with it. Not a single person, even the ones who were directly personally responsible and refused to turn up to court saw a single second of jail time.
(and that is ignoring that most of those private companies were convicted of doing what was considered safe, and often not promptly stopping when they knew it damaged people. The government started hurting people and ignored people telling them this would cause lead poisoning)
For people like me who might be unfamiliar with the craft of digital cutting of vinyl, felt, and similar materials, here's a good article from the New York Times from a decade ago [1].
It summarizes three brands of machines: Pazzles, in Boisie, Idaho, Cricut from Provo Craft in Spanish Fork, Utah, and Silhouette, from Silhouette America in Lindon, Utah, at that time. I believe Pazzles ceased operation in 2020.
[1] For Crafters, the Gift of Automation, By Peter Wayner, Dec. 2, 2009
> He got the prize before he did much mongering though.
He and Nixon did plenty of mongering already in 1971, when they firmly backed and tried to cover up Pakistan's military atrocities in what is now Bangladesh. 10 million refugees didn’t prevent the Nobel committe from giving him the prize in 1973.
I think you might be replying to the wrong comment. I was talking about Obama. I do not believe Obama was doing a lot with Nixon in 1971, considering he would have been like 10 years old at that point.
No, Kissinger was far, far worse than any other recipient of the peace prize.
Quote from Gary Bass, professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University and author of "The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide:"
"In at least one crucial part of the world, Kissinger’s legacy is fixed: In South Asia, Indians and Bangladeshis widely remember Kissinger as an unusually cruel and cold-hearted person. As they bitterly recall, he and Richard Nixon firmly supported Pakistan’s military dictatorship throughout its bloody crackdown in 1971 on what today is Bangladesh, sending some 10 million Bengali refugees fleeing into India. In one of the worst atrocities of the Cold War, Pakistan’s junta brushed aside the results of a democratic election, killed awful numbers of Bengalis and targeted the Hindu minority among the Bengalis. (Bangladesh is now the eight-largest country in the world, with a population larger than Russia or Japan, as well as a major Muslim country with considerable strategic importance in South Asia.) On the White House tapes, Kissinger sneered at Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.”
"Kissinger’s actions in 1971 were clouded by his own ignorance about South Asia, his emotional misjudgments and his stoking of Nixon’s racism toward Indians. Kissinger’s policies were not only morally flawed but also disastrous as Cold War strategy. As U.S. government officials presciently warned him, a Pakistani crackdown would result in a futile civil war with India sponsoring the Bengali guerrillas, creating the conditions for Soviet-backed India to rip Pakistan in two—a strategic defeat for the United States and a strategic victory for the Soviet Union. And don’t forget that Kissinger knowingly violated U.S. law in allowing secret arms transfers to Pakistan during the India-Pakistan war in December 1971. Despite warnings from White House staffers and State Department and Pentagon lawyers that such arms transfers were illegal, Nixon and Kissinger went ahead, with Kissinger saying that doing so was “against our law”—a scandal of a piece with an overall pattern of lawlessness that culminated with Watergate."
Kissinger was a horrific choice. You get no quarrel from me on that. But the Obama thing was ridiculous and they should have waited longer before giving him it.
Geez, man. Even Eric "Cathedral and the Bazaar" Raymond is mindblown that he can basically specify software into existence. The technology is here today, it's real, and it works.
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