law

"Garnishments can occur after a creditor obtains a court judgement against someone who owes them money. Some people are not aware of the court hearings, often because they have not been informed by the creditor and don’t show up to argue their cases. [...] But once a court gives the go-ahead, creditors are free to take a portion of a person's wages from their . A separate order allows them to seize money from an individual's bank account. requires that debtors are left with at least $217.50 a week in take-home pay—for a family of four, that's less than half the federal poverty level. Some states protect more income from creditors, but creditors aren't limited to targeting money. They are free to seize cars, even if a debtor needs a vehicle to get to work to earn the money to pay off their debts."

"Garnishments are also coming from the , even though Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos announced on March 25 that the department would halt collection actions and wage garnishments for 60 days beginning March 30."

"Though some protections exist for people struggling financially during the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the stimulus package signed into law on March 27, they largely ignore those who were already on the edge of financial ruin. The CARES Act has paused federal student loan debt payments and payments on federally-backed mortgages, and various cities and states have suspended evictions. But few states have stopped creditors from moving ahead with , repossessions, and attachments (one-time seizures of bank accounts). This means that in many cases, the pandemic will tip people [...] into an economic abyss from which it will be difficult or impossible to recover. Even the one-time $1,200 stimulus payments promised to millions in the U.S. can be garnished by financial institutions in many states."

"About one-third of Americans have debts in collection, according to the . Total reached an all-time high in the last quarter of 2019, at $14.5 trillion, according to the . Unemployment checks are supposed to be protected from creditors, but even they are at risk of seizure once they are deposited into bank accounts. To protect their benefits, debtors must file a court motion, which is challenging in scores of jurisdictions where the coronavirus has closed most courts. People who do succeed in filing motions are being told they must wait weeks and sometimes months for their cases to be heard. In the meantime, the funds remain frozen."

"Yes, we have one party here. But so does America. Except, with typical extravagance, they have two of them!"

"In Portugal in April 1974, before the liberals in the army turned on the oldest Fascist dictatorship in Europe and broke open all the literal and metaphorical prison gates, there had been only one legal party. On May Day of that year, the Socialist and Communist Parties were able to fill the streets of the capital city. Within days, a conservative and a liberal party had been announced, and within a very short time Portugal was, so to say, a “normal” European country. Those parties, with their very seasoned leaders, had been there all along. All that was required was for the brittle carapace of the ancien régime to be shattered."

"Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people."

"The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats."

"As the coronavirus epidemic stretches on, working people are facing an economic collapse, the likes of which have not been seen since the Great Depression. Organizing to fight for an immediate ban on all layoffs has to be an essential part of any program to protect the working class and to make the capitalist’s pay for their crisis. [...] Confronting this crisis ultimately means confronting capitalism, and that means directly resisting these layoffs, since layoffs are always the first weapon used against working people in moments of . es and corporations that have benefited from years of economic growth (not to mention the massive of workers’ labor) owe employees and their families a huge debt and it’s time to pay up."

"When times are good, capital can extract huge profits from labor with little risk. For instance, after the last economic crisis, the (thanks in large part to government bailouts) not only managed to recover all of its losses by 2013, it then proceeded to almost double its value in the seven years that followed — an average rate of growth equal to about 14 percent per year. By contrast, average hourly wages for working people, which rose less than three percent per year for most of that same period, recovered much more slowly, and many workers actually saw their wages fall or remain flat when adjusted for inflation. When times are bad, however, in moments of crisis, when profits are low, or when there is little or no demand — such as we are seeing in many industries today — corporations and companies can protect themselves and their by simply letting workers go. Workers, on the other hand usually must continue to pay for food, rent, healthcare, and basic utilities in order to survive. As a consequence, while capital can often weather the storm of such economic crises, they can severely weaken the power of the working class by creating what Marx called a vast . And since unemployment insurance compensations are rarely available to all and always only for a short period of time, workers — whether laid off or only threatened with the prospect of layoffs—will eventually be pressured to work much harder for less wages. And this is precisely why the future of worker’s power depends on how we respond to this crisis now. While capitalists and their paid politicians will scoff at these demands, claiming they are economically infeasible or impossible, this is because they only understand the language of profit and cannot imagine a world run for the benefit of all. Nonetheless, the fact remains that capital has significant resources that could and must be made available to all working people."

"Even if you're not laid off, a lot of people are more interested in finding new jobs now because you realize that tech is no longer safe"

"Políticos: somos vuestros jefes y os estamos haciendo un ERE"

"Thus, when one talks of a “Negro Establishment” in most places in this country, one is talking of an Establishment resting on a white power base; of handpicked blacks whom that base projects as showpieces out front. These black “leaders” are, then, only as powerful as their white kingmakers will permit them to be."

"The white power structure rules the black community through local blacks who are responsive to the white leaders, the downtown, white machine, not to the black populace. These black politicians do not exercise effective power. They cannot be relied upon to make forceful demands in behalf of their black constituents, and they become no more than puppets."

"There's gonna be a lot of slow singing and flower bringing if my burglar alarm starts ringing."

"The "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns... No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary."

"The alliance’s expansion coincided with the creeping spread of neoliberalism, helping secure the dominance of U.S. financial capital and sustain the rapacious military-industrial complex that underpins much of its economy and society. The umbilical bond between NATO membership and neoliberalism was expressed clearly by leading Atlanticists throughout the alliance’s eastward march. On March 25, 1997, at a conference of the Euro-Atlantic Association held at Warsaw University, Joe Biden, then a senator, outlined the conditions for Poland’s accession to NATO. “All NATO member states have free-market economies with the private sector playing a leading role,” he said."

"If you look at NATO, with the exception of eight countries—we’re one of them—every country is way behind. They’re delinquent, especially Germany, in paying their NATO bills. That means we end up paying it, and we’re not doing it. I told them; we’re not doing it. And they’ve increased their spending now $130 billion, going up to $400 billion a year. It’s all because of me. Then you hear the country doesn’t like me. I mean, I can understand that, because President Obama and other presidents, in all fairness, would go in there and they’d make a speech and they’d leave. I went in there, I looked, and I said, “This is unfair. We’re paying for NATO.” We’re paying for NATO. Almost all of it. So they rip us off on the military and then they rip us off, with the European Union, on trade. And Biden doesn’t have a clue."

"We’re incredibly complacent about the continuous delivery of peace and stability in our lives, and a hell of a lot of that depends on NATO... We tend to take it for granted."

"With the creation of a separate West German state, with the conclusion of the Paris Agreements and with the inclusion of West Germany in NATO, the Western powers finally unilaterally broke the Potsdam Agreement, this sole valid document in international law for Germany in the postwar period. It is not coincidental that in connection with this a special occupation status of the three powers was established in West Berlin. By this three-sided occupation status, the Western powers themselves confirmed that they violated the international-legal basis of their occupation regime in West Berlin and that this regime was based only on undisguised military force."

"Russia's latest move comes after the Kremlin and Ukraine failed to reach a permanent ceasefire agreement last weekend in Istanbul for the first in-person negotiations in the three-plus years of fighting. It also comes as the United States has backed off of its military and financial commitments to Ukraine under the Trump administration, forcing European nations to step up in the fight against the Kremlin. In recent months, NATO has bolstered its presence along the eastern flank with Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, with thousands of troops and equipment having been deployed to the border. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutt warned last winter that the Kremlin wanted to "wipe Ukraine off the map" and could attack other parts of Europe, too. "It is time to shift to a wartime mindset," Rutte said. "How many more wake-up calls do we need? We should be profoundly concerned. I know I am." In a stark warning, he added, "Russia is preparing for long-term confrontation. With Ukraine, and with us.""

"U.S. President Donald Trump said he is not worried about Russia preparing to escalate conflict in Europe. In response to a question from a reporter late Tuesday afternoon about Russian military buildup along the NATO borders of Finland and Norway, President Trump replied with seven words: "I don't worry about that at all." He continued: "It'll be very safe. Those are two countries, you're gonna be very safe." Reports emerged as early as late April that Russia was expanding its military presence near the Finland border. Meanwhile, Russian propagandists and officials alike have repeatedly threatened their European neighbors with the invasion of sovereign NATO territory. It came as Trump issued a chilling nuclear ultimatum to Iran."

"President Putin wanted to slam NATO’s door shut. Today, we show the world that he failed. That aggression and intimidation do not work. Instead of less NATO, he has achieved the opposite. More NATO. And our door remains firmly open."

"[I]f the Kaiser in World War I and the Fuehrer in World War II had been on notice that an armed attack against any of the friendly nations with whom we associate ourselves would be considered a cause even for us to consider and study and determine whether or not we would enter into the common defense, it would have stopped both those wars before they occurred, and in my opinion that one single designation of a commonalty of interest in the North Atlantic pact... is the best assurance against World War III."

"The decay of the Soviet experiment should come as no surprise to us. Wherever the comparisons have been made between free and closed societies -- West Germany and East Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, Malaysia and Vietnam -- it is the democratic countries what are prosperous and responsive to the needs of their people. And one of the simple but overwhelming facts of our time is this: Of all the millions of refugees we've seen in the modern world, their flight is always away from, not toward the Communist world. Today on the NATO line, our military forces face east to prevent a possible invasion. On the other side of the line, the Soviet forces also face east to prevent their people from leaving."

"Finns were reminded of the events of 1939, when the Soviet Union denied their country’s right to exist and attacked it in the Winter War. More than eighty years later, Russia’s unprovoked aggression against Ukraine did far more to sway opinion in Finland and Sweden than its questioning of their right to join NATO."

"NATO was a triumph of organization and effort, but is was also something very new and very different. For NATO derived its strength directly from the moral values of the people it represented, from their high ideals, their love of liberty, and their commitment to peace. But perhaps the greatest triumph of all was not in the realm of a sound defense or material achievement. No, the greatest triumph after the war is that in spite of all of the chaos, poverty, sickness, and misfortune that plagued this continent, the people of Western Europe resisted the call of new tyrants and the lure of their seductive ideologies. Your nations did not become the breeding ground for new extremist philosophies. You resisted the totalitarian temptation. Your people embraced democracy, the dream the Fascists could not kill. They chose freedom. And today we celebrate the leaders who led the way—Churchill and Monnet, Adenauer and Schuman, De Gasperi and Spaak, Truman and Marshall. And we celebrate, too, the free political parties that contributed their share of greatness—the Liberals and the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats and Labour and the Conservatives. Together they tugged at the same oar, and the great and mighty ship of Europe moved on."

"Germany’s new center-right chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has vowed to transform the country’s armed forces into Europe’s strongest to counter the rising threat from Russia. With the help of the opposition Greens, the ruling coalition abandoned strict borrowing limits on defense spending earlier this year to allow for unprecedented military procurement. To further bolster the military, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said in June that Germany will need to increase its armed forces by as many as 60,000 active soldiers, or by roughly a third. The government hopes that a new voluntary military service initiative set to go into effect in 2026 will help."

"Germany pledged the additional brigades as part of an effort to meet new NATO capacity goals that leaders agreed to at a summit in the Netherlands in June. Independent of the battle tanks and armored fighting vehicles, Berlin received initial approval earlier this year to purchase more than 1,000 Patria armored modular vehicles from the Finnish defense manufacturer of the same name. The Patrias will replace the Bundeswehr’s aging fleet of Fuchs armored fighting vehicles, the people said."

"The Parties to this Treaty reaffirm their faith in the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and their desire to live in peace with all peoples and all governments. They are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law. They seek to promote stability and well-being in the North Atlantic area. They are resolved to unite their efforts for collective defence and for the preservation of peace and security."

"Needless to say, in the 1950s when most Africans were still colonial subjects, they had absolutely no control over the utilization of their soil for militaristic ends. Virtually the whole of North Africa was turned into a sphere of operations for NATO, with bases aimed at the Soviet Union. There could easily have developed a nuclear war without African peoples having any knowledge of the matter. The colonial powers actually held military conferences in African cities like Dakar and Nairobi in the early 1950s, inviting the whites of South Africa and Rhodesia and the government of the U.S.A. Time and time again, the evidence points to this cynical use of Africa to buttress capitalism economically and militarily, and therefore in effect forcing Africa to contribute to its own exploitation."

"Yes, today we have genuine Russian weather. Yesterday we had Swedish weather. I can't understand why your weather is so terrible. Maybe it is because you are immediate neighbours of NATO."

"The [2014] crisis in Ukraine, and the prospect of a further crisis in NATO itself, is not the result of our triumphalism but of our failure to react to Russia’s aggressive rhetoric and its military spending. Why didn’t we move NATO bases eastward a decade ago?"

"Our recommitment to Afghanistan must include increasing NATO forces, suspending the debilitating restrictions on when and how those forces can fight, expanding the training and equipping of the Afghan National Army through a long-term partnership with NATO to make it more professional and multiethnic, and deploying significantly more foreign police trainers."

"Germany is considering purchasing up to 2,500 armored fighting vehicles and as many as 1,000 battle tanks as part of a joint European effort to create new NATO brigades to deter Russia, according to people familiar with the matter. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has asked Germany to contribute as many as seven combat brigades to the alliance within the next decade. The fighting vehicles and tanks, if approved, would equip these forces, people familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity. The ramp-up reflects growing concern among allies about heightened Russian hostility since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The order under consideration by Defense Minister Boris Pistorius and the Bundeswehr’s top generals would include as many as 1,000 Leopard 2 battle tanks and up to 2,500 GTK Boxer armored fighting vehicles, the people said. The tanks are manufactured by KDNS and Rheinmetall, and the fighting vehicles are made by ARTEC, a joint venture of KDNS and Rheinmetall."

"NATO... is a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage."

"The mutual trust that emerged with the end of the Cold War was severely shaken a few years later by NATO's decision to expand to the east. Russia had no option but to draw its own conclusions from that."

"We are convinced that it is high time talks on tactical nuclear systems were initiated among all interested countries. The ultimate objective is to completely eliminate those weapons. Only Europeans who have no intention of waging war against one another are threatened by those weapons. What are they for then and who needs them? Are nuclear arsenals to be eliminated or retained at all costs? Does the strategy of nuclear deterrence enhance or undermine stability? On all these questions the positions of NATO and the Warsaw Pact appear to be diametrically opposed. We, however, are not dramatising our differences. We are looking for solutions and invite our partners to join us in this quest."

"On the purpose of NATO: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”"

"[The North Atlantic Pact is] an instrument of tremendous moral power. It lays before the world the desires of great nations to live in peace and to be free from molestation and hostile pressures by aggressive States. It mobilizes the forces of peace against the forces of exploitation and war. It is a shining monument to the highest and finest international ethics. It is a symbol of national integrity and good faith between nations."

"Nato was created as a defensive alliance. It was not an alliance that was designed for one of the allies to go on a war of choice and then oblige everybody else to follow. I'm not sure that's the sort of Nato that any of us wanted to belong to."

"Let me put it this way: If one NATO country attacks another NATO country, then NATO ends. Then it’s game over"

"I am speaking tonight, not as an Englishman, but as an international servant of the fourteen countries which are linked together by the North Atlantic Treaty. I hope that I am being heard by many men and women in those countries, because I am convinced that, if the Alliance is to prosper, it must have the personal understanding and support of the citizens of the North Atlantic Community. When I am asked: "What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?", I am tempted to answer: "It is a great adventure. It is perhaps the most challenging and most constructive experiment in international relations that has ever been attempted. It is undoubtedly our best chance of preventing the measureless catastrophe of a third world war." But obviously I must be more specific than that. The best definition of NATO that I can give you in a few wordsis that it is the organisation that has been set up to ensure that the fourteen partners to the Treaty think together and act together in political, military, economic, social, cultural and other matters: in fact, to ensure that it is a true and thorough partnership. The fourteen partners are (I give them in alphabetical order): Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States."

"Did NATO have problems? Of course. Not for nothing was Henry Kissinger's famous 1965 work entitled The Troubled Partnership: A Reappraisal of the Atlantic Alliance. The list of NATO's deficiencies was long, including, after the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, the feckless abandonment by several European members of their responsibility to provide for their own self-defense. Under President Clinton, America suffered its own military declines, as he and others saw the collapse of Communism as "the end of history," slashing defense budgets to spend on politically beneficial domestic welfare programs. This "peace dividend" illusion never ended in much of Europe, but it ended in America with the September 11 mass murders in New York and Washington by Islamicist terrorists. NATO's future has been intensely debated among national-security experts for decades, with many urging a broader post-Cold War agenda. Barack Obama criticized NATO members for being "free riders," not spending adequately on their own defense budgets, but, typically, he had simply graced the world with his views, doing nothing to see them carried out."

"In the years gone by, NATO summits were important events in the life of the alliance. Over the past two decades, however, the gatherings became almost annual, and therefore less than exciting. Until the 2017 NATO summit in Brussels, that is. Trump livened things up by not referring to the North Atlantic Treaty's iconic article 5, which stated that "an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all." This provision is actually less binding than its reputation, since each alliance member will merely take "such action as it deems necessary." It had been invoked only once, after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. Nonetheless, NATO had been a successful deterrence structure, for decades blocking the Red Army from knifing through Germany's Fulda Gap and deep into the heart of Western Europe. Of course, the United States was always the overwhelmingly greatest force contributing to our alliance, and it was primarily for our benefit, not because we were renting ourselves out to defend Europe, but because defending "the West" was in America's strategic interest. As a Cold War bulwark against Soviet expansionism, NATO represented history's most successful politico-military coalition."

"Trump, at his first NATO summit in 2017, complained that too many allies were not meeting their 2014 commitment, collectively made at Cardiff, Wales, to spend 2 percent of their GDP for defense in the European theater. Germany was one of the worst offenders, spending about 1.2 percent of GDP on defense, and always under pressure from Social Democrats and other leftists to spend less. Trump, despite, or perhaps because, of his father's German ancestry, was relentlessly critical. During consultations on the strike against Syria in April, Trump asked Macron why Germany would not join in the military retaliation against the Assad regime. It was a good question, without an answer other than domestic German politics, but Trump rolled on, criticizing Germany as a terrible NATO partner and again attacking the Nord Stream II pipeline, which would see Germany paying Russia, NATO's adversary, substantial revenues. Trump called NATO "obsolete" during the 2016 campaign but argued in April 2017 that the problem had been "fixed" in his presidency. His noteworthy failure in 2017 to mention article 5 allegedly surprised even his top advisors because he personally deleted any reference to it from a draft speech. True or not, the 2017 summit set the stage for the potential crisis we faced in 2018."

"Before joining NATO, each country had to establish civilian control of its army. Before joining the European Union, each adopted laws on trade, judiciary, human rights. As a result, they became democracies. This was “democracy promotion” working as it never has before or since."

"The Atlantic Treaty is not aggressive. It is purely defensive. Those who attack it as offensive do so from a bad conscience. They take just the same line as the Nazis did when every attempt by the nations to get together was denounced as the encirclement of Germany. We seek by the pact to gain for the nations a sense of security which they so ardently desire. We seek by the organization of security to make the world safe against aggression and by pooling of strength to reduce the burden of armaments."

"The storm had been brewing well before I arrived in the West Wing, but now it was directly ahead. Trump was correct on the burden-sharing point, as Obama had been, a convergence of views that might have shaken Trump's confidence in his own had he paid attention to it. The problem, from the perspective of US credibility, steadfastness, and alliance management, was the vitriol with which Trump so often expressed his displeasure with allies' not achieving the objective, or in some cases not even seeming to be interested in trying. In fact, earlier Presidents had not succeeded in keeping the alliance up to the mark in burden-sharing in the post-Cold War era. I certainly believed that, under Clinton and Obama in particular, the US had not spent enough on its own behalf for defense, regardless of what any of the allies were doing or not doing. If any of this were merely a critique of Trump's style, which it seemed to be for many critics, it would be a triviality. Personally, I've never shied away from being direct, even with our closest friends internationally, and I can tell you they are never shy about telling us what they think, especially about America's deficiencies. In fact, it was not Trump's directness but the veiled hostility to the alliance itself that unnerved other NATO members and his own advisors."

"Now let me explain why these countries have bound themselves together by a treaty. At the end of the Second World War the democracies, hoping and believing that the United Nations would prove an effective instrument for peace, disarmed as fast as they could. Soviet Russia did nothing of the sort. They maintained their armed strength at wartime level. They launched a world-wide campaign of lies and hatred against the free world. They turned the proceedings of the United Nations into a farce by the use of the veto. They brought under their control, one by one, the countries of Eastern Europe. The democracies realised that unless something were done, it was only a matter of time before the countries of Western Europe alse were overrun. What was to be done? How was the balance of power to be restored? No single nation could do this alone. It could be done only by combining. That is why the North Atlantic Treaty was conceived. It was signed about 4½ years ago."