big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
ba-ba-ding:
A report released this month by Public Campaign demonstrates just how important it is for Americans to battle corporate special interests and reclaim our democracy.
Big corporations spend more money lobbying than they pay in taxes !
arrrrgh… $millions$ $misplaced$
A calm & detailed account: myoccupylaarrest.blogspot.com
The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park.
============
Each seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
============
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized.
LA’s mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says this is “the LAPD’s finest hour”.
Hillary Clinton at the United Nations unabashedly arguing to the world that LGBT rights are human rights.
In most cases, this progress was not easily won. People fought and organized and campaigned in public squares and private spaces to change not only laws, but hearts and minds. And thanks to that work of generations, for millions of individuals whose lives were once narrowed by injustice, they are now able to live more freely and to participate more fully in the political, economic, and social lives of their communities.
Now, there is still, as you all know, much more to be done to secure that commitment, that reality, and progress for all people. Today, I want to talk about the work we have left to do to protect one group of people whose human rights are still denied in too many parts of the world today. In many ways, they are an invisible minority. They are arrested, beaten, terrorized, even executed. Many are treated with contempt and violence by their fellow citizens while authorities empowered to protect them look the other way or, too often, even join in the abuse. They are denied opportunities to work and learn, driven from their homes and countries, and forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm.
I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity, who have a right to claim that, which is now one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time.
I speak about this subject knowing that my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect.
So, in 2006, a bill passed requiring the U.S. Postal Service to fund 75 years worth of its pensions over a 10-year span. This is a requirement that applies to no other federal agency.
Congress is killing the Post Office.
…was told, in other words, to act like a business.
But the politicians never really let it.
The Postal Service doesn’t receive any taxpayer dollars, funding itself entirely through customer revenue. But it still has to deal with Congress as a micromanager.
Two examples.
1) …public gatherings of 10 or more persons require a government permit, and police have the authority to stop an unofficial assembly of five or more persons deemed likely to cause a disturbance of the peace.
2) …four or more people must obtain permits for all activity and displays in state buildings and apply for those permits at least 72 hours in advance.
Occupy Anchorage is told tents are OK but permits are required for an igloo.
The Nation, “Reclaiming the Politics of Freedom,” can act as a guide to why this is so important and what the roadmap toward changing it could look like. He says:
The secret of conservatism’s success — as any reading of Reagan’s speeches and writings will attest — has been to locate this notion of freedom in the market…
We must confront this ideology head-on: not by temporizing about the riskiness or instability of the free market or by demonstrating that it (or its Republican stewards) cannot deliver growth but by mobilizing the most potent resource of the American vernacular against it. We must develop an argument that the market is a source of constraint and government an instrument of freedom. Without a strong government hand in the economy, men and women are at the mercy of their employer, who has the power to determine not only their wages, benefits and hours but also their lives and those of their families, on and off the job…
The politics of freedom does not dismiss the value or importance of state resources. But rather than conceiving of them as protections against the hazards of the market or indices of public compassion, it sees them as sources of power, as the tools and instruments of personal and collective advance. Armed with universal healthcare, unemployment benefits, public pensions and the like, I am less vulnerable to the coercions and castigations of an employer or partner. Not only do I have the option of leaving an oppressive situation; I can confront and change it — for and by myself, for and with others. I am emboldened not to avoid risks but to take risks: to talk back and walk out, to engage in what John Stuart Mill called, in one of his lovelier phrases, “experiments in living.”…
That is why the politics of freedom refuses to view the state as the conservative does: as a constraint. Or as the welfare-state liberal does: as a distributive machine. Instead, it views the state the way the abolitionist, the trade unionist, the civil rights activist and the feminist do: as an instrument for disrupting the private life of power. The state, in other words, is the right hand to the left hand of social movement.
Romney says his Bain experience shows he knows how to create jobs. A closer examination paints a different picture….
Under Romney, Bain became one of the nation’s top leveraged-buyout firms…. Boston-based Bain acquired more than 115 companies.
Romney and his team maximized returns by
♦ firing workers,
♦ exploiting government subsidies, and
♦ flipping companies for large profits.
Ruthlessly, some of his deals slid into bankruptcy in order to extract profits.
==========
So Mr. Romney made his fortune in a business that is, on balance, about job destruction rather than job creation. And because job destruction hurts workers even as it increases profits and the incomes of top executives, leveraged buyout firms have contributed to the combination of stagnant wages and soaring incomes at the top that has characterized America since 1980.
Now I’ve just said that the leveraged buyout industry as a whole has been a job destroyer, but what about Bain in particular? Well, by at least one criterion, Bain during the Romney years seems to have been especially hard on workers, since four of its top 10 targets by dollar value ended up going bankrupt. (Bain, nonetheless, made money on three of those deals.) That’s a much higher rate of failure than is typical even of companies going through leveraged buyouts — and when the companies went under, many workers ended up losing their jobs, their pensions, or both.
So what do we learn from this story? Not that Mitt Romney the businessman was a villain. Contrary to conservative claims, liberals aren’t out to demonize or punish the rich. But they do object to the attempts of the right to do the opposite, to canonize the wealthy and exempt them from the sacrifices everyone else is expected to make because of the wonderful things they supposedly do for the rest of us.
The truth is that what’s good for the 1 percent, or even better the 0.1 percent, isn’t necessarily good for the rest of America — and Mr. Romney’s career illustrates that point perfectly.
Quote # 1:
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.” —Aristotle
Quotes # 2:
“Start with the following two facts: Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works. So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.” —Newt Gingrich
Even without knowing German, see if you can tell what Der Spiegel thinks of the GOP field.
Bill Moyers asks,
What two things don’t mix well?
Plutocracy & democracy.
Watch the ‘must-see’ video in which Bill explains why.
“Perhaps the worst part of this immensely distressing story is how unexceptional it is.”
“It would be hard to imagine a greater betrayal of the ideals and origins of a nation of immigrants than systemic abuse of this kind, perpetrated as it usually is by agents of the government.”
Cain speaks for nearly a half an hour [at Florida’s The Holy Land Experience amusement park] and despite a couple fleeting “999” mentions, keeps his speech to topics of faith and his recent battle with cancer.
He begins with a story about how he knew he would survive when he discovered that his physician was named “Dr. Lord,” that the hospital attendant’s name was “Grace” and that the incision made on his chest during the surgery would be in the shape of a “J.”
“Come on, y’all. As in J-E-S-U-S! Yes! A doctor named Lord! A lady named Grace! And a J-cut for Jesus Almighty,” Cain boomed.
He did have a slight worry at one point during the chemotherapy process when he discovered that one of the surgeon’s name was “Dr. Abdallah.”
“I said to his physician assistant, I said, ‘That sounds foreign–not that I had anything against foreign doctors–but it sounded too foreign,” Cain tells the audience. “She said, ‘He’s from Lebanon.’ Oh, Lebanon! My mind immediately started thinking, wait a minute, maybe his religious persuasion is different than mine! She could see the look on my face and she said, ‘Don’t worry, Mr. Cain, he’s a Christian from Lebanon.'”
“Hallelujah!” Cain says. “Thank God!”
Story at Yahoo News.
This Republican has had enough.
For the past three years, the media have praised the enthusiasm and energy the tea party has brought to the GOP. Yet it’s telling that that movement has failed time and again to produce even a remotely credible candidate for president. Sarah Palin, Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich: The list of tea-party candidates reads like the early history of the U.S. space program, a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff. A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership.
They are indicators of a crisis of followership.
The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.
Some News Leaves People Knowing Less [pdf]
According to the latest results from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind Poll, some news sources make us less likely to know what’s going on in the world.
Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who they don’t watch any news at all.
When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?
“Some call this the closing of the conservative mind. Alas, the conservative mind has proved itself only too open, these past years, to all manner of intellectual pollen.
“This is, unfortunately, not merely a concern for Republican voters. The conservative shift to ever more extreme, ever more fantasy-based ideology has ominous real-world consequences for American society. “
→ Fox News Viewers are the Most Misinformed: A Seventh Study Arrives to Prove It
There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert the public awareness.
Dave Winer tweets on Gingrich,
“He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.”
Paul Krugman says ‘Only fools and clowns believe Republican ideology’. Newt Gingrich is just the latest of the “fools and clowns”
“I have a structural hypothesis here. You have a Republican ideology, which Mitt Romney obviously doesn’t believe in. He just oozes insincerity, that’s just so obvious. But all of the others are fools and clowns. And there is a question here, my hypothesis is that maybe this is an ideology that only fools and clowns can believe in. And that’s the Republican problem.”
→ The Top 0.1% Of The Nation Earn Half Of All Capital Gains
Justice Louis Brandeis warning to the nation: “We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
→ …the story of a memo on how lobbyists to the American Bankers Association go about discrediting the Occupy Wall Street movement. Here’s more, and here is the PDF of the actual memo.
→ http://peppersprayingcop.tumblr.com/
“The world is a dangerous place. Not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” —Albert Einstein
http://storify.com/adbusters/police-brutality
“I see a portrait of violence. Violence of many different kinds–physical, economic, emotional–enshrined in a sociopathic compact.” —Umair Haque
“When you protect the things you believe in with your body, it changes you for good. It radicalizes you for good,” he said.
The transcript is “Shame on you!”
You will see why the right wing seeks to control email rumors…
The Ultimate Liberal Fact Sheet and Debate Aide – Pt. 1
“!”
“Let us review for just a second how Newt Gingrich makes his money,” Maddow began.
“For starters, he hands out fake awards in exchange for cash.”
Video here: Getting to the Root of Newt’s Loot
150+ responses to “The US is Now a Corporate Monarchy”
snippet:
One part of the story is that the vast majority of Americans see no connection between government actions and their daily lives. They don’t believe political action will have any effect. It’s not cynicism, it’s that they don’t think about the issues at all.
There’s also an incredible lack of information about issues. [Low Information Voters] It’s not clear whether this is due to people not paying attention or the coverage by mainstream media (FOX viewers are even less well informed than people who pay no attention).
snippet:
The funding mechanisms which enabled the current control must be thwarted.
snippet:
I prefer the term Corporate Kleptocracy…
snippet:
Americans do not take action because the corruption, greed, and loss of trust has happened at a very slow pace. We are burdened with our own form of confirmation bias of “that-can’t-be-happening” and we watch our liberties be taken away from us literally brick by brick.
@lessig in the NYT with a slightly brillant campaign finance reform proposal.
It’s really about our society. There are so many institutions that are suffering from the same corruption from moneyed interests.
Lawrence Lessig: Yes, and that’s not an accident.
…just a particular instance of a more general dynamic in accounting, financial services, healthcare, academics, the media—you can pick your field—and we can describe a similar dynamic of corrupting influences that we’ve allowed to seep into the institution that distract it from what we think the institution is for.
Barry Ritholtz:
In short, our new overlords are enormously well funded, well connected, relentless and perhaps most of all, patient. This new King was not appointed by primogeniture, or even Divine Right, but by acquiring enough profits in the free market that they can buy control over society, even as they thwart that free market ideal for their own ends.
We have become, in short, a Corporate Monarchy.
republicless
1) … heartfelt urgency and a keen desire for righting wrongs
2) … but drowned by the financial few
Class war? No. Class peace.
Rich And Poor Alike,
Occupy Wall Street’s threat of class war could be good for everyone.
Rebellion as a coping mechanism for economic inequality:
The Beatniks: We aren’t wealthy, but we don’t need it.
We will find fulfillment in life’s experiences.
The hippie movement: We aren’t wealthy, but we don’t need it.
Love will get us through.
The punks: We aren’t wealthy, but we don’t need it.
We embrace living with less and rage against those who disagree.
The slackers: We aren’t wealthy, and we have to not care.
Thinking about it makes us too sad.
Hip hop: We aren’t wealthy, but we know someone who got there.
Maybe there’s hope.
And now today: We aren’t wealthy, and we never will be.
We can be happy anyway.
“The individuals who linked arms and actively resisted, that in itself is an act of violence,” UC police Capt. Margo Bennett said. “I understand that many students may not think that, but linking arms in a human chain when ordered to step aside is not a nonviolent protest.”
“Confrontation with words, some debate, some understanding, goes so much further.”
“If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change is what conservatism is all about: changing everything so things, hierarchy in particular, can stay as they are.”
Said another way by Ann Coulter:
“Our blacks are so much better than their blacks. To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it.”