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Richard Stallman's Political Notes

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Gift to banks in tax attacks

samedi 2 décembre 2017 à 01:00

The big US banks would get a 28-billion-dollar gift from the SCROTUS tax attacks.

SCROTUS are rushing in the hope of hiding the bill's consequences from the public.

That's what they did in their previous attempt to take medical coverage from millions of Americans (which this bill also would do).

In case you don't know what this bill would do, here are descriptions.

Campaign for school vouchers

samedi 2 décembre 2017 à 01:00

The Koch brothers are spending heavily, and secretly, on an ad campaign for school vouchers in Arizona.

Americans have nearly always rejected school vouchers, which are a scheme for states to direct public money into religious education. The plan is typically designed so that a school voucher would not offer enough money to pay for an unsubsidized private school. (Those would remain limited to wealthy parents.) Thus, the only schools that the vouchers would enable parents to select would be religious schools, subsidized by a church.

TV networks on net neutrality

samedi 2 décembre 2017 à 01:00

US cable TV networks are saying nothing about impending network neutrality decision. Perhaps that is because most of them are also the ISPs that stand to profit from eliminating network neutrality.

'Promoting terrorism' in UK

samedi 2 décembre 2017 à 01:00

The UK has arrested 379 people for supposedly promoting terrorism in July 2016 to June 2017. Only 105 of them were subsequently charged with "terrorism offenses".

Some of these 105 were charged for preparing (or even carrying out) a real terrorist act, or trying to persuade others to do so. The state would like us to assume that all 105 were found doing those things, but we have every reason to doubt that. This is because the laws against "terrorism" are so broad that many sorts of other activities can be prosecuted as "terrorism".

Nonviolent support for various progressive causes has been labeled "terrorism" in the UK. So has studying or working on the information Snowden gave us.

The FBI has often prosecuted feckless fantasy terrorists, who dreamed of carrying out an attack but would never have tried anything outside their fantasies (and lacked the competence to try). I suspect the UK does likewise. Surely some of those charged in the UK are in the same category.

Surely some are being prosecuted for having a copy of a book that the state disparages. That is included in the laws against "terrorism".

Even being suspected of preparing terrorism has been defined as a crime in the UK. People can literally be prosecuted for the crime of being suspected.

By lumping these people together under a vague heading, the state directs attention away from the question of what these people were really accused of doing. This enables the state to magnify the danger (thus scaring people into parting with their freedom), make itself look efficient, and disguise whether those people are real terrorists or not.

Play breaks in school

samedi 2 décembre 2017 à 01:00

One elementary school started giving the students four 15-minute play breaks each day, and discovered that the kids mostly did better.

A single experience is not proof that this method will improve every school, but does show it is not generally harmful. Why not try it elsewhere and see?

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