Collection agencies and their attorneys file hundreds of thousands of lawsuits every year in California, many of which are filed against debt-free individuals such as Senator Correa with no connection to the original creditor. Incredibly, these lawsuits rarely include the information needed to prove the claim is legitimate, because current law doesn’t require it. Consequently, innocent Californians wind up with a judgment on their record or have their wages garnished because they were sued for someone else’s debt.
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Filed under: Business, Economy, Opinion, Politics
General William Westmoreland commanded the U.S. military operations in the Vietnam War (1964–68) during the Tet Offensive. Tet is the Vietnamese New Year. We on the ground knew that Westmoreland’s highly publicized, overly optimistic assessments of the war were not true. We “won” every battle, but lost the war. The 1968 Tet Offensive, in which communist forces, having staged a diversion at the Battle of Khe Sanh, attacked cities and towns throughout South Vietnam. U.S. and South Vietnamese troops successfully fought off the attacks, and the communist forces took heavy losses, but the ferocity of the assault shook public confidence in Westmoreland’s previous assurances about the state of the war.
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Filed under: Opinion, War
The world community is forming, the borders that stand between nations are dissolving as the evolutionary forces of human consciousness awaken to the possibility of sustainable communities. Corporations are the usurpers who cross borders to exploit labor and the environment, buying off corrupt politicians to reap their profits, while families are being ripped apart by deportations that stop people from exercising their rights to a decent living.
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Filed under: Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Healthcare, Homelessness, Housing, Immigration, Labor, Opinion, Politics, War
What underlies the Citizens United decision is the assumption that corporations are natural persons within the meaning of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution and therefore, have First Amendment rights. Corporate personhood dates back to the controversial 1886 Supreme Court decision in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. Although the Supreme Court supposedly did not make a direct ruling on the question of “corporate personhood,” the misleading notes of a clerk finding corporate personhood were incorporated in the Court’s decision. Whether this is myth or reality doesn’t matter at this point. This result was a Supreme Court precedent finding that a corporation is a “natural person.”
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Filed under: Law, News, Opinion, Politics
After the US Department of Justice advised that Guantanamo prison could be considered outside US legal jurisdiction, the first twenty captives arrived at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002. Guantanamo has become a place of prisoner mistreatment, torture and indefinite detention. It is an international embarrassment.
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Filed under: Law, Opinion, Politics, War
What prompted this sentimental journey back in time when all of these freedoms were taken for granted was a twenty-something guy standing in line behind me who appeared to be taking all of these indignities in stride. At first I admired his good-natured acquiescence to all that we have lost in our precipitous slide into a quasi police state.
But it also made me sad that he has no idea, no memories, and no chance of ever knowing all the freedoms he and his generation have lost.
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Filed under: Opinion, Politics, Transportation, Travel & Leisure, War
Fluoride can prevent and even reverse tooth decay by enhancing remineralization, the process by which fluoride “rebuilds” tooth enamel that is beginning to decay. In 1945, Grand Rapids, Michigan, adjusted the fluoride content of its water supply to 1 ppm and thus became the first city to implement community water fluoridation in a public water system.
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Filed under: Healthcare, Opinion
