Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
David Cay Johnston at DCReport writes—The Rich Are Making Out Like Bandits In This Pandemic:
Tens of millions of Americans are cashless, many desperate to feed their children. Meanwhile the richest Americans merrily float on a rapidly rising tide of money thanks mainly to Trump & Co.
My analysis of Federal Reserve data shows a record flow of greenbacks let the corporate rich pour trillions of dollars into their accounts as they fired tens of millions.
Now that money just sits, idle.
How can it be that as want ravages cash-starved Americans, money wealth rises for the already rich like the tide rushing into the Bay of Fundy?
Part of the answer is as simple as it is awful. The Trump administration and its Radical Republican Senate allies are taking care of those who need help the least while declaring enough already for the unemployed. [...]
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QUOTATION
“With my white friends, I’m always half Mexican. They never say I’m half Irish. Never say I’m half white. Like I’m tainted halfway from the standard. It’s like when I was a kid and I thought vanilla ice cream meant no flavor, like it was the base of all of the flavors. But vanilla is a bean. Like chocolate is a bean. Like cinnamon is a root. All roots and beans. All flavors. There is no base. No ice cream without a flavor.” ~~Bill Konigsberg, The Music of What Happens (2019)
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BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2009—Torture: This shouldn't need to be said:
Let's put this straight right off the bat: favoring the use of torture is not a political position, it's a mental illness.
Any further discussion of torture should be unnecessary. However, since our our national media seems to be enthusiastically pimping depravity as a governing principle, we might as well point out that the guys that have been there, done that, seen the elephant show and lived to come home? They say it doesn't work, isn't worth it, and they want nothing to do with it.
If you need further evidence, check out Mike Ritz, a former SERE instructor who worked with our servicemen and women to prepare them for harsh interrogations torture, and who went on to found his own private "stress laboratory" where he could "use just about any technique" he had read about to "see what kind of results he could get." Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator who questioned prisoners in several locations, including Abu Ghraib. In other words, these are two people who have tortured other people, neither of them is shy about that fact, and they are willing to talk about that experience. Both men appeared on NPR's Tell Me More. The guys who have really done this stuff to actual human beings do not exactly back up the words of American's biggest Dick.
First off, they discussed the difference between what service people in the intelligence field had been trained to do, and what they were then asked to do by the Bush administration.