HSD1
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MONTREAL - The Montreal police Child Sexual Exploitation Investigations Section has announced the arrest of six young men in a case of human trafficking and prostitution.
Two underage girls allegedly met the suspects in February 2011 and were forced into prostitution.
The girls told police that they managed to flee to their freedom a week later.
Police have arrested Abdul Karim Nassereddine, 20, Naib Ali Soilihi, 20 and Mohammed Rami Taha, 19. Mezri Mehdi Mohamed Hamza, 21, turned himself in Thursday after being sought by authorities.
The two others arrested cannot be named, as they were minors at the time of the alleged offences.
The suspects were charged with a variety of crimes related to sexual assault and prostitution of minors Thursday.
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Not as much as there was on those who sided with the left and musis to be honest. Or have we forgotten all about the grooming and calls for Sikh genocide by the left?
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It's like a Arabic equivalent of the 'thugee cult' that preoccupied Indian orientalists so much.
Well seeing as the Brits used their own criminal underclass to intercept letters and carry out assassinations as well as fight wars, it's no surprise they wanted to learn off others to see how similar they were and come up with tatics to possibly counter it when they turned up or travelled through their territory.
Similar to how some Europeans were desperate to learn the history of others so they could pre-empt any reaction to their trade tactics or rule.
hsd, explain to me the tortoise bit. how would they use it to explore someones house?
and why they werent scared of having their hands cut off?
didnt the thuggees do their acts in worship of god?
If they made a hole in someone's house a tortoise with a candle on its back would light up the room and wouldnt knock anything over or make noise that would wake anyone up. I think the houses back then were more open plan so it was easier to see what was in each room, as well as just leave the tortoise behind if someone turned up. I doubt it could grass them up!
I think with any punishment the deterrence is aimed at amateurs who are smart enough to weigh up the risk involved. The dumb get caught and punished, the experienced get away with it continuously. It seems the criminal underworld of the Middle East was relatively impenetrable to the average man - that's why there was a market for books about the tactics of house robbers, telling tales of criminal groups etc. Not knowing the ins and outs of how the criminals act would allow them to stay off the radar to people who wouldnt know what to look for. Also many of these people were from Kurdish or Persian groups who had been impoverished by Islamic rule so this life was the only way forward.
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And yet a lot of people feel we should be grateful to the first immigrants for letting us live there. If they had their way, their would be no Punjabi communities in North America.
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Worth tryign though, don't you think?
And I wonder even in those times how they would feel about half of their country being in Pakistan.
Read the comments though, reading them right now interesting though.
Of course it's worth trying. But we need to see and avoid the pitfalls that we usually walk into so blithely.
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Beautiful pictures.
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Why doesnt KPS go and do it himself if he is so tough? Or can he only murder Punjabis?
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In yet another gruesome incident in Sangrur district, a 13-year-old girl, who was returning home from a tuition class, was allegedly raped and murdered by unidentified persons at Gaura village near Amargarh on Monday evening.
Amargarh is a town adjoining Malerkotla, where a 12-year-old boy was recently burnt alive following an altercation.
The murder of the girl, a class-8 student, was gruesome as she was hit with a brick on the head and face, apparently to conceal her identity. Her body was found in the fields with severe injury marks on the head, the police said, adding that a case of rape and murder had been registered.
The police, denying the charges of rape, formed a medical board of doctors, which conducted the post-mortem at the civil hospital, Malerkotla. The viscera have been sent to the forensic lab for examination.
SSP Mandeep Singh Sidhu said, "The police have included charges of rape, as submitted by the parents, but the medical board found no signs of sexual assault. However, we are probing the incident from all angles, including attempt to rape." He said a combing operation had been launched to nab the accused.
According to information, when the girl, who had gone for tuition, did not return, the family informed the police. During the search, the family found the bicycle of the girl on a kutcha road in the fields and spotted her body later.
The SSP said the murder was committed sometime between 6.30pm and 7.30pm as the girl left the house of a classmate at 6pm after attending the tuition class and visiting a temple. The girl's house is located in the fields, with only a few houses around. Finding her alone, the accused committed the crime, he added.
Sources said the police had rounded up two drug addicts from the area, who were roaming near the site of the crime. "We are probing the incident and the accused would be nabbed soon," said the SSP. The body was handed over to the parents.
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Chances are they wont. In their top lot it's drummed into them that they did the world a favour. For the lower classes, their imperial past was good - for them. They can up sticks and sod off to Oz, Canada, NZ etc and just dump themselves down without a thought. They expect everyone to speak English. People abroad are susceptible to 'Brand Britain' which helps with selling tat to them. Obviously that isnt fair to the Abos or natives in these places, but as long as the Brits hide what really goes on then no one will say anything. As long as Sikhs think they are part of this and are served by this system, we too will play along. Regardless of how much the reality shows otherwise.
And to be honest, is it in our interests to take off their rose tinted glasses. We've already seen how Cameron talks tough on immigration here but talks up emigration to the UK when he is in India. If they did act more honest about their past, would you believe them? Or would you think that they are just saying what you wanted to hear and were after concessions on other things? I could think of a whole heap of other things that Sikhs need than an apology or remorse. It's not like any guilt trip from them would bring back Maharaja Ranjit Singh's family, return the Kohinoor, give us back all those who died pointlessly in foreign wars, hand back all the artifacts, pay back all the taxes they stole, make up for the breaking of the Treaty Of Lahore and the deliberate mess up of Partition.
Ultimately Sikhs need to see what they need and get it. Expecting these people to change out of the goodness of their hearts is a road we've been down before and it never ever turns out well. They play us with our ott optimism and naivety so they can string us along until they get what they want. Then we're expendable. Due to their own sectarianism they will never care too much about others but will dress up their intentions as being benevolent. They will do this on a personal level all the way up to a national level, in similar ways to the muslims. This will never change. The only way out is to sort ourselves out, push them to arm's length and then do as we please - like the Chinese and other East Asian countries have or are doing. Trying to get involved with the West or muslims and trying to stop them seeing the negatives of their actions is like trying to get a serial killer to empathise with his victim. It's just not worth the effort because they are the way they are. At this point it's about damage control. And hoping our lot dont do more to exacerbate the present 'situation'.
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Isnt this how Hitler started?
Joking aside, it is pretty clear he is doing this to avoid jail. Dopey sulleh are playing along and will help to get him off. Then he'll probably dissapear into the back room of whatever group he creates next to pull the strings from there. I think SIkhs need to be vigilant as if there is a fallout in the EDL command structure it could lead to attacks by smaller firms on identifiable Asian targets - which tend to be Sikh ones. Expect the BNP to come out of whatever hole they crawled into. I wonder what the financial backers of the EDL make of all this and what part they had to play in it?
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Walking on hot coals has more to do with dry feet than mentality. Lying on a bed of nails has more to do with pressure and the surface area of the nails than some magic ability to stop the nails going through the skin.
In reality, the laws of physics will always apply to fights. No matter your pain tolerance, a well placed powerful punch to your head will still rattle your brains around your skull and possibly make you pass out. If you dont know how to clench a fist then chances are you will break your hand when you hit someone. No matter how mentally elevated you are, it wont change the amount of force needed to break your bones or put you into a position where you get your head kicked in.
The fact that we are even having this conversation shows how complacent and delusional SIkhs have become. Either that or you're all soft headed Canadians.
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Typical goray. Give them spirituality and they twist it to try and gain more sensory pleasure/ sexual thrills.
Says it all.
For a people who turned up in places, killed everyone, squatted on their land and lived like nothing happened, it doesnt take a genius to understand that they dont have any qualms about stealing and monetising things to suit themselves. Ironically when the Chinese do it, it becomes a major thing. It's not like we dont have people in our own lot who twist stuff to suit themselves:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=254360008036534
Their big destination in India is that Kama Sutra place.
'Your Indian??? Wow, you must have an intense sex life!'
It's not even funny how many white girls are like this.
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Probably. No different to most of the older generation.
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Or you could do both.
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You know what. When goray are scared, they start to try and placate. And they have good reason to be scared of sullay right now.
We also saw similar attempts to placate blacks after the riots.
The idea that all goreh are the same and that the establishment is running scared is pretty wide of the mark. If anyone's scared it's the whites who live near large muslim communities or working class types who are more at risk from grooming or street gang violence. The middle class dont come into contact with that many muslims and the ones they do know are just taxi/restaurant workers or educated types so they arent likely to have grief with them. The top couldnt care less. In fact they let them in to give a nice blame target to their own working class for problems or use them in foreign policy to destabilise foreign countries. That's why other countries' intelligence agencies referred to London as 'Londonistan'. Now it's convenient to run the other way. Blaming muslims for social ills, banning the burka, questionning the safety of Arab investments in the UK etc etc.
If you look at the riots the police left all the working and middle class areas alone regardless of who lived there. They bunkered down in the well off areas. The muslims got it as bad as everyone else. Remember how those white and black boys who ran over all those muslims in Brum got let off? Dont mistake the impotence of the British justice system with it's apathy towards sikh issues for some kind of appeasing of muslims. What do you mean by placating blacks? Not shooting them for no reason? They might say they've changed but as time goes on it will be the same old, same old.
They are both pretty young and naive. This dude probably didn't know that the girl was under the age of consent, and she probably didn't either. Outside of that law it appears to be consensual sex.
I think the judge made the right decision.
The definition of justice doesnt include the word gullible.
I guess when Americans drop bombs and strafe houses in the Middle East they shouldnt be held responsible for and kids who die. After all, how are they to know?
I guess you could also say the rape of muslim children is justified now as this is what is in their religion so they should be treated like that.
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Jinder Kaur (35), a widow, was set ablaze by two persons when she objected to molestation by them in Qadian town of Gurdaspur district on Saturday. She suffered 70% burns and was rushed to Noor Hospital, Qadian, from where she was shifted to Guru Nanak Hospital, Amritsar. She gave her statement before the duty magistrate at the Amritsar hospital on Sunday.
Kaur, who works as a domestic help, said she was going home to nearby Kahlwan village around 11am on Saturday when two acquaintances, Sayeed Ahmad (27), and his friend, Ghulam Muhayudin (70), asked her to have tea with them at a flour mill. She agreed and was having tea with the duo when Ahmad, a deaf-mute, and Muhayudin started molesting her. When she objected, they sprinkled petrol on her and set her afire.
The police on Sunday registered a case under sections 307 (attempt to murder), 354 (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty) and 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the Indian Penal Code at Qadian police station and arrested the accused, who are both flour mill workers.
http://www.yespunjab.com/punjab/item/31629-punjab-widow-set-ablaze-after-being-molested
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Becoming a father at 98 is no small thing. Though Ramjit Raghav, now 99, of Sonepat hogged the limelight for being one of those exceptions in 2012, his happiness was shortlived.
His two sons and wife are reportedly missing. Raghav works as labourer at a farm in Kharkhodda town of Sonepat district. His then 52-year-old wife Shakuntala Devi had delivered a healthy baby boy in October 2012. The couple was blessed with their first child in 2010.
The nonagenarian's elder son Vikramjit Singh had disappeared mysteriously from Sonepat town in June this year and despite having registered a missing complaint Vikramjit was never traced.
Before he could come out of the pain of losing his elder son, his wife and younger son Karamjit also went missing under mysterious circumstances on September 25.
Talking to mediapersons, Raghav said due to his old age he found it difficult to keep track of the case at police station and court. "Being blessed with two sons at such an old age had invoked my faith in the almighty. I had special plans for my kids' education, but now my dreams are shattered," he said.
Kharkhodda station house officer (SHO) Ravinder Kumar admitted that Raghav had come to the police station earlier this week. He said though Raghav had come, he did not lodge a missing complaint. He said that police would extend all help to the elderly.
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Call it market competition or increased lust for money, unscrupulous travel agents are finding newer ways to dupe people desperate to go to foreign shores. The latest being the "go now, pay later" scheme.
A Batala youth, who recently returned home after escaping from the clutches of a Nawanshahr racketeer and his conmen, has revealed the new dimension to the already infamous business of human trafficking.
In Hoshiarpur, to meet Rajya Sabha member Avinash Rai Khanna, who is also an active human rights activist, Karan Singh said he and two of his friends Sandip Singh and Ranjodh Singh came across one Ravi in Chandigarh last month who proposed the name of travel agent Balwinder Kumar of Bichhori village who they could approach if they wanted to go to Canada. He said Ravi took the phone numbers of all three of them and also of four other youths who had come from different places in pursuit of a suitable agency and told them that Balwinder himself would call them.
"When Balwinder called up from a phone which was traced to Turkey, he told us that a Canadian company needed work force and demanded Rs 20 lakh per person to arrange for the visas. He said the payment would be taken after their arrival in Vancouver. After we agreed, his agents remained in touch with us and told us that one by one, we three would be sent to Canada via Nepal," said Karan.
He said they all submitted photocopies of their passports to the agents in West Bengal via email as they were told to bring their original passports personally to Nepal. Karan said a SpiceJet flight to Kathmandu was booked for him on June 27 and the same day he reached there where Balwinder Kumar's men received him and took him to a flat.
"They told me that the flight I was supposed to catch had been cancelled and that they would arrange another flight. Then suddenly they tied my hands and feet and asked me to follow their dictates. They drugged me that made me dizzy," said Karan. "In the meantime, they contacted Sandip and left a message for my family to call me at a particular cell number. Next day they made me talk to my family at gun point and tell them the details of my journey to Canada which they had already charted out on a piece of paper, to make them believe that I had safely reached Canada. They threatened to kill me saying they would blackmail my family to pay a ransom of Rs 1 crore if I disobeyed or made a mistake while talking. As directed, I asked my family to hand over cash to whichever place the agents wanted," said Karan, claiming that a sum of Rs 24.2 lakh was given in three instalments.
Karan revealed that on July 4, he was woken up in the wee hours, blindfolded, bundled into a car and dropped at the bus stop. "At one point of time I feared that I would be killed but then they gave me Rs 2,500, my passport, 200 Nepali rupees and asked me to go back," he said. "I took a bus to the border and then boarded a train to reach Bengal and finally reached Delhi from where I returned home, he added.
His friend Sandip said he had also reached Kathmandu but he became suspicious and insisted on completing all formalities at the airport hotel itself. "In the night, one of the conmen spilled the beans when he was drunk and told me that they were running an illegal business," said Sandip. He revealed that after him, the accused were to victimise Ranjodh but he and Karan alerted him. Sandip revealed that the men who handled them were from Bihar and they had high-end vehicles and mobile sets.
Khanna asked Nawanshahr SSP Dhanpreet Kaur to take appropriate action, who marked the inquiry to SP (detective) Gagan Ajit Singh. Khanna also promised to take up the matter with the government to expose the illegal nexus.
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It was 1993, during congressional debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican congressmen who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. To this day, I remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris, and Tokyo than with their fellow American citizens.”
That was only the beginning of the period when the realities of outsourced manufacturing, financialization of the economy, and growing income disparity started to seep into the public consciousness, so at the time it seemed like a striking and novel statement.
At the end of the Cold War many writers predicted the decline of the traditional nation-state. Some looked at the demise of the Soviet Union and foresaw the territorial state breaking up into statelets of different ethnic, religious, or economic compositions. This happened in the Balkans, the former Czechoslovakia, and Sudan. Others predicted a weakening of the state due to the rise of Fourth Generation warfare and the inability of national armies to adapt to it. The quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan lend credence to that theory. There have been numerous books about globalization and how it would eliminate borders. But I am unaware of a well-developed theory from that time about how the super-rich and the corporations they run would secede from the nation state.
I do not mean secession by physical withdrawal from the territory of the state, although that happens from time to time—for example, Erik Prince, who was born into a fortune, is related to the even bigger Amway fortune, and made yet another fortune as CEO of the mercenary-for-hire firm Blackwater, moved his company (renamed Xe) to the United Arab Emirates in 2011. What I mean by secession is a withdrawal into enclaves, an internal immigration, whereby the rich disconnect themselves from the civic life of the nation and from any concern about its well being except as a place to extract loot.
Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?
Being in the country but not of it is what gives the contemporary American super-rich their quality of being abstracted and clueless. Perhaps that explains why Mitt Romney’s regular-guy anecdotes always seem a bit strained. I discussed this with a radio host who recounted a story about Robert Rubin, former secretary of the Treasury as well as an executive at Goldman Sachs and CitiGroup. Rubin was being chauffeured through Manhattan to reach some event whose attendees consisted of the Great and the Good such as himself. Along the way he encountered a traffic jam, and on arriving to his event—late—he complained to a city functionary with the power to look into it. “Where was the jam?” asked the functionary. Rubin, who had lived most of his life in Manhattan, a place of east-west numbered streets and north-south avenues, couldn’t tell him. The super-rich who determine our political arrangements apparently inhabit another, more refined dimension.
To some degree the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity towards public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than $500 billion dollars in annual federal, state, and local education funding into private hands—meaning themselves and their friends. What Halliburton did for U.S. Army logistics, school privatizers will do for public education. A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.
In both world wars, even a Harvard man or a New York socialite might know the weight of an army pack. Now the military is for suckers from the laboring classes whose subprime mortgages you just sliced into CDOs and sold to gullible investors in order to buy your second Bentley or rustle up the cash to get Rod Stewart to perform at your birthday party. The sentiment among the super-rich towards the rest of America is often one of contempt rather than noblesse.
Stephen Schwarzman, the hedge fund billionaire CEO of the Blackstone Group who hired Rod Stewart for his $5-million birthday party, believes it is the rabble who are socially irresponsible. Speaking about low-income citizens who pay no income tax, he says: “You have to have skin in the game. I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”
But millions of Americans who do not pay federal income taxes do pay federal payroll taxes. These taxes are regressive, and the dirty little secret is that over the last several decades they have made up a greater and greater share of federal revenues. In 1950, payroll and other federal retirement contributions constituted 10.9 percent of all federal revenues. By 2007, the last “normal” economic year before federal revenues began falling, they made up 33.9 percent. By contrast, corporate income taxes were 26.4 percent of federal revenues in 1950. By 2007 they had fallen to 14.4 percent. So who has skin in the game?
While there is plenty to criticize the incumbent president for, notably his broadening and deepening of President George W. Bush’s extra-constitutional surveillance state, under President Obama the overall federal tax burden has not been raised, it has been lowered. Approximately half the deficit impact of the stimulus bill was the result of tax-cut provisions. The temporary payroll-tax cut and other miscellaneous tax-cut provisions make up the rest of the cuts we have seen in the last three and a half years. Yet for the president’s heresy of advocating that billionaires who receive the bulk of their income from capital gains should pay taxes at the same rate as the rest of us, Schwarzman said this about Obama: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” For a hedge-fund billionaire to defend his extraordinary tax privileges vis-à-vis the rest of the citizenry in such a manner shows an extraordinary capacity to be out-of-touch. He lives in a world apart, psychologically as well as in the flesh.
Schwarzman benefits from the so-called “carried interest rule” loophole: financial sharks typically take their compensation in the form of capital gains rather than salaries, thus knocking down their income-tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent. But that’s not the only way Mr. Skin-in-the-Game benefits: the 6.2 percent Social Security tax and the 1.45 percent Medicare tax apply only to wages and salaries, not capital gains distributions. Accordingly, Schwarzman is stiffing the system in two ways: not only is his income-tax rate less than half the top marginal rate, he is shorting the Social Security system that others of his billionaire colleagues like Pete Peterson say is unsustainable and needs to be cut.
This lack of skin in the game may explain why Romney has been so coy about releasing his income-tax returns. It would make sense for someone with $264 million in net worth to joke that he is “unemployed”—as if he were some jobless sheet metal worker in Youngstown—if he were really saying in code that his income stream is not a salary subject to payroll deduction. His effective rate for federal taxes, at 14 percent, is lower than that of many a wage slave.
After the biggest financial meltdown in 80 years and a consequent long, steep drop in the American standard of living, who is the nominee for one of the only two parties allowed to be competitive in American politics? None other than Mitt Romney, the man who says corporations are people. Opposing him will be the incumbent president, who will raise up to a billion dollars to compete. Much of that loot will come from the same corporations, hedge-fund managers, merger-and-acquisition specialists, and leveraged-buyout artists the president will denounce in pro forma fashion.
The super-rich have seceded from America even as their grip on its control mechanisms has tightened. But how did this evolve historically, what does it mean for the rest of us, and where is it likely to be going?
That wealth-worship—and a consequent special status for the wealthy as a kind of clerisy—should have arisen in the United States is hardly surprising, given the peculiar sort of Protestantism that was planted here from the British Isles. Starting with the Puritanism of New England, there has been a long and intimate connection between the sanctification of wealth and America’s economic and social relationships. The rich are a class apart because they are the elect.
Most present-day Americans, if they think about the historical roots of our wealth-worship at all, will say something about free markets, rugged individualism, and the Horatio Alger myth—all in a purely secular context. But perhaps the most notable 19th-century exponent of wealth as virtue and poverty as the mark of Cain was Russell Herman Conwell, a canny Baptist minister, founder of perhaps the first tabernacle large enough that it could later be called a megachurch, and author of the immensely famous “Acres of Diamonds” speech of 1890 that would make him a rich man. This is what he said:
I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich. … The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly … ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. … I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins … is to do wrong … let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings.Evidently Conwell was made of sterner stuff than the sob-sister moralizing in the Sermon on the Mount. Somewhat discordantly, though, Conwell had been drummed out of the military during the Civil War for deserting his post. For Conwell, as for the modern tax-avoiding expat billionaire, the dollar sign tends to trump Old Glory.
The conjoining of wealth, Christian morality, and the American way of life reached an apotheosis in Bruce Barton’s 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows. The son of a Congregationalist minister, Barton, who was an advertising executive, depicted Jesus as a successful salesman, publicist, and the very role model of the modern businessman.
But this peculiarly American creed took a severe hit after the crash of 1929, and wealth ceased to be equated with godliness. While the number of Wall Street suicides has been exaggerated in national memory, Jesse Livermore, perhaps the most famous of the Wall Street speculators, shot himself, and so did several others of his profession. There was then still a lingering old-fashioned sense of shame now generally absent from the über-rich. While many of the elites hated Franklin Roosevelt—consider the famous New Yorker cartoon wherein the rich socialite tells her companions, “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt”—most had the wit to make a calculated bet that they would have to give a little of their wealth, power, and prestige to retain the rest, particularly with the collapsing parliamentary systems of contemporary Europe in mind. Even a bootlegging brigand like Joe Kennedy Sr. reconciled himself to the New Deal.
And so it lasted for a generation: the wealthy could get more wealth—fabulous fortunes were made in World War II; think of Henry J. Kaiser—but they were subject to a windfall-profits tax. And tycoons like Kaiser constructed the Hoover Dam and liberty ships rather than the synthetic CDOs that precipitated the latest economic collapse. In the 1950s, many Republicans pressed Eisenhower to lower the prevailing 91 percent top marginal income tax rate, but citing his concerns about the deficit, he refused. In view of our present $15 trillion gross national debt, Ike was right.
Characteristic of the era was the widely misquoted and misunderstood statement of General Motors CEO and Secretary of Defense Charles E. “Engine Charlie” Wilson, who said he believed “what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.” He expressed, however clumsily, the view that the fates of corporations and the citizenry were conjoined. It is a view a world away from the present regime of downsizing, offshoring, profits without production, and financialization. The now-prevailing Milton Friedmanite economic dogma holds that a corporation that acts responsibly to the community is irresponsible. Yet somehow in the 1950s the country eked out higher average GDP growth rates than those we have experienced in the last dozen years.
After the 2008 collapse, the worst since the Great Depression, the rich, rather than having the modesty to temper their demands, this time have made the calculated bet that they are politically invulnerable—Wall Street moguls angrily and successfully rejected executive-compensation limits even for banks that had been bailed out by taxpayer funds. And what I saw in Congress after the 2008 crash confirms what economist Simon Johnson has said: that Wall Street, and behind it the commanding heights of power that control Wall Street, has seized the policy-making apparatus in Washington. Both parties are in thrall to what our great-grandparents would have called the Money Power. One party is furtive and hypocritical in its money chase; the other enthusiastically embraces it as the embodiment of the American Way. The Citizens United Supreme Court decision of two years ago would certainly elicit a response from the 19th-century populists similar to their 1892 Omaha platform. It called out the highest court, along with the rest of the political apparatus, as rotted by money.
We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. The people are demoralized. … The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced, business prostrated, homes covered with mortgages, labor impoverished, and the land concentrating in the hands of capitalists. The urban workmen are denied the right to organize for self-protection, imported pauperized labor beats down their wages. … The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind, and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.It is no coincidence that as the Supreme Court has been removing the last constraints on the legalized corruption of politicians, the American standard of living has been falling at the fastest rate in decades. According to the Federal Reserve Board’s report of June 2012, the median net worth of families plummeted almost 40 percent between 2007 and 2010. This is not only a decline when measured against our own past economic performance; it also represents a decline relative to other countries, a far cry from the post-World War II era, when the United States had by any measure the highest living standard in the world. A study by the Bertelsmann Foundation concluded that in measures of economic equality, social mobility, and poverty prevention, the United States ranks 27th out of the 31 advanced industrial nations belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Thank God we are still ahead of Turkey, Chile, and Mexico!
This raises disturbing questions for those who call themselves conservatives. Almost all conservatives who care to vote congregate in the Republican Party. But Republican ideology celebrates outsourcing, globalization, and takeovers as the glorious fruits of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” As a former Republican congressional staff member, I saw for myself how GOP proponents of globalized vulture capitalism, such as Grover Norquist, Dick Armey, Phil Gramm, and Lawrence Kudlow, extolled the offshoring and financialization process as an unalloyed benefit. They were quick to denounce as socialism any attempt to mitigate its impact on society. Yet their ideology is nothing more than an upside-down utopianism, an absolutist twin of Marxism. If millions of people’s interests get damaged in the process of implementing their ideology, it is a necessary outcome of scientific laws of economics that must never be tampered with, just as Lenin believed that his version of materialist laws were final and inexorable.
If a morally acceptable American conservatism is ever to extricate itself from a pseudo-scientific inverted Marxist economic theory, it must grasp that order, tradition, and stability are not coterminous with an uncritical worship of the Almighty Dollar, nor with obeisance to the demands of the wealthy. Conservatives need to think about the world they want: do they really desire a social Darwinist dystopia?
The objective of the predatory super-rich and their political handmaidens is to discredit and destroy the traditional nation state and auction its resources to themselves. Those super-rich, in turn, aim to create a “tollbooth” economy, whereby more and more of our highways, bridges, libraries, parks, and beaches are possessed by private oligarchs who will extract a toll from the rest of us. Was this the vision of the Founders? Was this why they believed governments were instituted among men—that the very sinews of the state should be possessed by the wealthy in the same manner that kingdoms of the Old World were the personal property of the monarch?
Since the first ziggurats rose in ancient Babylonia, the so-called forces of order, stability, and tradition have feared a revolt from below. Beginning with Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre after the French Revolution, a whole genre of political writings—some classical liberal, some conservative, some reactionary—has propounded this theme. The title of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous work, The Revolt of the Masses, tells us something about the mental atmosphere of this literature.
But in globalized postmodern America, what if this whole vision about where order, stability, and a tolerable framework for governance come from, and who threatens those values, is inverted? What if Christopher Lasch came closer to the truth in The Revolt of the Elites, wherein he wrote, “In our time, the chief threat seems to come from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses”? Lasch held that the elites—by which he meant not just the super-wealthy but also their managerial coat holders and professional apologists—were undermining the country’s promise as a constitutional republic with their prehensile greed, their asocial cultural values, and their absence of civic responsibility.
Lasch wrote that in 1995. Now, almost two decades later, the super-rich have achieved escape velocity from the gravitational pull of the very society they rule over. They have seceded from America.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revolt-of-the-rich/
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An Asian country that managed to industrialise and not import millions of muslims and others to do it? Say it aint so.
Makes you wonder what exactly goes through Badal's and the Akali Dal's heads when they look at the world around them.
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Foreign students attend a class on the Saemaul Movement at an auditorium of the Korea Saemaul Undong Center in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, in
this file photo taken on Nov. 15, 2011. Up to 240 students from 46 countries mainly in Asia and Africa took part in the program.
Nam has passed away, but, as the maxim suggests, the legacy of the architect of the country’s post-war economic growth model under President Park Chung-hee will likely go on. The strategy, credited for lifting the country from the ashes of the 1950-53 Korean War to one of the world’s economic powers, is expected to evolve with various studies and research, and is being exported to underdeveloped nations to save numerous people from chronic poverty and malnutrition.
Asia’s fourth largest economy is poised to make a second leap from the ground laid by Nam in an effort to join the league of super rich countries. And, as was the case in Nam’s era of the 1960s and ‘70s, everything in progress is being closely monitored by many developing countries with an insatiable appetite to emulate it.
Nam, an economist-turned-politician, died of complications from testicular cancer on May 18. He was 89.
Late former Prime Minister Nam Duk-woo initiated the nation’s evelopment project
Living legacy
Seoul’s Jamsil area remains largely undeveloped in the top file photo taken in the 1970s. Thedevelopment of the area started in the 1980s to turn it one of the most developed and affluent districtsof Seoul.
Continuing evolution
President Park Geun-hye is pushing forward with a package of new growth policies centered on creativity in order to make the country richer and more powerful.
Amid the prolonged downturn in the world economy, many developing nations in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East are keenly aware of what she’s doing with the policies. Any tangible achievements will lead to an increase in observers, some of whom may be interested in adopting the so-called “creative economy” to their economic policy portfolio, analysts say.
Korean diplomats and advocates of the new growth model have hosted explanation sessions for policy makers and business leaders of stagnant economies. Inspired by the new concept, Costa Rica is reportedly seeking the help of the Korean government and experts to secure a concrete picture of Park’s economic policies.
Professor Lee Min-hwa at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology is one of the vocal advocates of the creativity-oriented growth model.
He hosted a promotional session on April 15 for ranking bureaucrats from Costa Rica in San Jose, the United States, and another one in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 25.
He is scheduled to travel to the Middle East later this month to meet executives of state-run companies and investors in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/culture/2013/05/386_136384.html
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True story bro. What's so hard to believe? Judges in the UK let people off for all kinds of flimsy reasons. The UK justice system isnt some pure and sancrosanct thing that always gets it right.
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Malerkotla police clueless in 12-year old Vidhu's brutal murder case
A day after 12-year-old boy Vidhu Jain was burnt alive by unidentified persons in Malerkotla, the local police failed to have any breakthrough in the case on Tuesday.
The police is totally clueless about the persons involved in such brutal crime as no arrest has been made so far in the case.
Indeed, station house masters of two police stations have been transferred to police lines with immediate for dereliction of duty.
Acting swiftly on the complaints of local residents, Senior Superintendent of Police Mandeep Singh Sidhu immediately relieved SHO of city I police station Parminder Singh and city II SHO Davinder Singh from the duty.
Meanwhile, demanding instant arrest of accused, the local residents comprised of several organisations of different communities, collectively staged protest throughout the day.
On Tuesday morning, agitators marched towards local hospital mortuary, where Vidhu's body had been kept for postmortem, before blocking Ludhiana-Malerkotla and Patiala-Malerkotla road for the whole day.
Sensing failure of the police in locating the accused, the protestors raised slogans against police and district administration officials.
Earlier, the family members of deceased Vidhu failed to possess his dead body till any arrest in the case.
Later in the evening, senior officials of police and district administration held meeting with family members persuaded them to carry out cremation ritual by assuring them of arrest of accused at the earliest. Hundreds of people were present at Vidhu's cremation, which was held at local cremation ground.
SSP Sidhu said they were working on different theories and were hopeful to nab persons behind the brutal incident.
"The police teams have been directed to accelerate hunt for the accused", he said.
"The foremost purpose was to ensure law and order situation in the areas as some anti state elements, who were trying to colour it as communal attack and motivating to disturb law and order condition", he said.
About transfer of SHOs, Sidhu said the locals complained that both the police officers had failed to pay heed to their repeated complaints even about little skirmishes and issues.
"Apart from it, both the police officers resorted to mild lathicharge to disperse protestors on Monday evening, here, without getting any orders from senior officers", Sidhu said.
Former Director General of Police and chairman of Punjab Wakf Board Mohammad Izhar Alama also demanded disciplinary action against police officers.
Heavy security arrangements were made to avoid any untoward incident.
All the entry points to Malerkotla city were sealed.
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In Hounslow the local community are trying to build a school. The following is a bizarre statement from a 'secular' organisation that wants to stop it:
http://www.secularism.org.uk/uploads/sikh-schools---the-debate-continues.pdf
What I find weird about it most is that someone read a book and took every single negative point and decided to use them as reasons for not allowing a Sikh school to open. Could you imagine a similar article using Muslim or English history to justify not allowing schools to be built for those communities? Why is it that we seem to get this flak from people who have done far worse?
Muslim Abuser Who 'didn't Know' That Sex With A Girl Of 13 Was Illegal Is Spared Jail
in Islam
Posted
Boy oh boy does someone have women issues. You're not West London Singh from SikhSangat are you?
Anyway, if you cant tell that an 18 year old MAN having sex with a 13 year old CHILD is wrong, then there is no point spewing the mumbo jumbo.
And we wonder why the Sikh community cant tackle the grooming issues it faces. Good luck raising your own daughters one day.