NSA Surveillance Program

I am having a problem understanding how the NSA surveillance program is suppose to work; or how it is suppose to protect us.

If the program records all phone calls, then the NSA knows that my number has called your number 9 times in the last week (remember, we were told the NSA doesn't know what was said).

So the NSA now has millions of millions of recorded phone calls; so what do they do now?  They can't manually look at them, so a computer must isolate certain numbers as suspect.  How do they ascertain which are those numbers?  If the NSA knows of a suspected terrorist, OK then, record all the calls that person makes.  But, unless that suspected terrorist calls me there is no purpose in recording my calls.

The only purpose of the program then becomes one of determining who I am calling; an adult book store or a  socialist party magazine and so on.  But what does that have to do with stopping terrorists?

Race in America

In light of the Martin/Zimmerman case just recently concluded, I did some research on the issue of race justice in this country.  I have in the past read a number of reports on this issue and for a time in the 1980's taught a US history class with a mini-topic of "Black History", so I always felt I had some knowledge of this issue.

However, my research turned up continuing issues of racial injustice in the legal system in this country.  The readers of this blog should not take my word for the problem but instead "google" the two items I recently came across.

First is the book entitled Slavery by Another Name by Douglass A. Blackmon.  The sub-title here is "the re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".  That speaks for itself.

Second was a film entitled American Violet about a situation in Texas in 2000 where the district attorney and police were arresting black residents on the uncorroborated word on one person, then giving those arrested the choice of taking a plea bargain for a crime they did not committed and go free, or risk a trial where they could have been jailed for years.

Years ago, when talking about the improvement in racial justice in this country, to a class, an African American student told me "You don't know what you are talking about".  I guess she was right.

Update:  Re-thinking this last sentence it would be more accurate to say that the discussion in class that day involved my argument that the Federal government was doing more to protect the rights of African Americans than the state governments were.  To that is what she replied to.

Obama and free trade agreements

According to Public Citizen News from March/April of 2013, the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that President Obama pushed and spoke highly of a year ago has not produced the benefits he said it would.
This agreement has "demonstrated the damage caused by yet another 'trade' agreement based on the model of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)".  Obama has been trying to "sell" these large trade agreements "with the same false promises".  Export growth to non-trade agreement nations has "exceeded US export growth to countries that are FTA partners by 38 % over the past decade".

Surveillance

Police can now record and store car license plate numbers.  They can track my car anywhere and whenever they want.  But they can not track the ownership and sale of all the handguns sold in this country.  One of the things that makes the US :"exceptional"; no other developed nation would allow it.

Along a similar note, the Obama admin is defending the NSA spy-fest on all our phone calls, emails and facebook traffic.  They even claim they have the authority to "build similar data bases of people's credit card transactions, hotel records and internet searches".  And many on the right want us to believe Obama is a liberal?

Tax Exemption

I need some advice on donations to a tax exempt organization; similar to the exemption and groups like the tea party organizations recently in the news.  My understanding is that charities identified as 501(c)(3) type organization allow for donations to be tax deductible.  I also believe that the tea party type organizations are known as 501(c)(4) organizations (no wonder no one understands the tax code).  My question then would be, are donations to a 501(c)(4) organization also tax deductible?

Trayvon Martin killing

After reading an NPR article advising African-American mothers to make sure their male children are dressed "church-ready' before leaving the house, in the hope that they will not be targeted by the police or some Zimmerman vigilante, it occurred to me that the answer to racial violence in this country is not to ban guns but to ban hoodies.  Remember the gun-fanatics will tell you that guns don't kill people, hoodies do.

Class Warfare

Cutting food stamps for the poor.  Cutting social security for the elderly.  Banks "offering" 1 % on CD's of over two years and then having to pay income tax on that amount.  Plus countless other ways the poor are impacted negatively by government action.  The irony here is that I will be accused of provoking class warfare by noting these facts.  This is just one of the things most people did not learn from studying American History: its always been class warfare and we know which class always comes out on top.  

Boondoggle

During the 1930's the WPA was accused of paying unemployed men to dig a ditch in the morning and then paying another group of men to fill the ditch in in the afternoon.  This was an example by those opposed to the New Deal of a "boondoggle".  A government program that was a waste of tax payers money.  

Now we have a much grander and more modern example of a boondoggle.  Any number of US corporations were paid-with tax payers money-to build an US Army headquarters in Kabul, Afghanistan for the cost of $ 34,000,000.  Next year another groups of US corporations will be paid to dismantle that same headquarters structure.  

The decision to build was made by the Obama admin in 2011 after the US Army said they did not want the building and would have no use for it.