Author's posts

Capitalism Driving Humanity’s Downfall

Raw Story, March 6th, 2010

In his film Capitalism: A Love Story [set to be released on DVD and Blu-ray Monday], Michael Moore squares off with the free-market system for its role in leveraging the United States’s wealth into the hands of a few.

But in one clip cut from the documentary — which Moore provided exclusively to RAW STORY — he interviews Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Chris Hedges, who explains how capitalism is actually contributing to the very downfall of the human race and the “degradation of the planet.”

“All sorts of people who have spent their lives studying climate change, from Bill McKibben on down, have warned us that we don’t have a lot of time left,” Hedges said. “So it’s not just that capitalism has destroyed our economic system and hijacked our political system, but it literally is extinguishing the system that sustains life. If that’s not thwarted soon…then we will begin to see massive dislocations, environmental refugees, further depleting of natural resources. Overpopulation is also an issue. The UN estimates that by 2050 the size of the planet will double.”

The very concept of capitalism, Moore declares in the film, is the problem because it inevitably leads to a system where the richest few control the means of production as well as the levers of power — leading to a “plutonomy,” a term used in a leaked Citigroup memo from 2005, in which the finance juggernaut concluded that the United States is no longer a democracy.

In the interview, Hedges decries America’s turn toward supply-side economics over the last three decades as the cause of stagnating middle class incomes, contrasting it with the increasingly lavish fortunes of the wealthy and the aid they often receive from the government at the expense of working people.

Stayin’ Alive Open Thread

You Say You Got A Real Solution?

Well, you know

We’d all love to see the plan

You ask me for a contribution

Well, you know

We’re all doing what we can…

I would hope that somehow the Democrats will learn a lesson from knowing they are going to take a serious beating in November, and do something about it.

They have 8 months to get the progressive and independent votes back.

Plenty of time to create and pass some useful legislation, like a universal single payer HCR bill, and plenty of time to charge, try and begin prosecution of Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the war criminals.

Why, I bet they could even get away with not prosecuting Obama as an accessory after the fact, as long as they prosecute the others, and defund the wars and start REALLY getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq.

And plenty of time to charge, try and prosecute Paulsen, Geithner, Bernanke, and Lloyd Blankfein, and the upper management of AIG, and break up Goldman Sachs.

If they do these things in the next few months they can win November with landslides, and Obama might even win a second term two years down the road.

Making Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public utilities would be icing on the cake.

Otherwise they are toast. And apparently republicans are worse. Somehow (scratches head in puzzlement).

Police Officers Shot At Pentagon

ABC News reported about half an hour ago:

Two police officers were injured by a gunman firing shots outside the Pentagon tonight and a suspect was in custody, a police spokesman said. Police said the officers’ injuries were not life-threatening. The officers were taken to George Washington Hospital in Washington. The shooter was injured when police returned fire, a spokesman said.

The shooting occurred at the Pentagon Metro Station, which is just outside the Pentagon’s main entrance. The shots were fired at about 6:35 p.m. ET.

The officers belonged to the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, the Defense Department said in a statement. One was apparently hit in the lower part of the body, according to reporters there. He appeared to be alert when he was loaded into an ambulance.

Initially, hundreds of employees at the Pentagon were ordered to go into “Code Red” — the entire building locked down, with no one allowed to enter or leave.

After about 45 minutes, people were allowed to leave the building through entrances other than the one closest to the Metro station. Metro trains bypassed the Pentagon station.

At least three ambulances were called to the scene, and all parking lots at the massive Defense Department headquarters were closed off, ABC News’ Martha Raddatz reported.

“All I know right now is that there was a shooting. We believe two officers, police officers, were hit. And I believe we have one person in custody,” Pentagon Police spokesman Chris Layman told ABC News’ Steven Portnoy.

Olympic Dream vs. Vancouver Reality

With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city’s newly launched independent media center. Believing that their might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.



Real News Network – March 04, 2010

Olympic dream vs. Vancouver reality

Media love-in with Winter Olympics challenged by city’s new journalist co-op

Franklin López is a video producer with the Vancouver Media Co-op. You can find the co-op at vancouver.mediacoop.ca. It is one of a series of similar projects getting started in Canada, currently there are also chapters in Toronto and Halifax. For the co-op’s coverage of the Olympics, go to 2010.mediacoop.ca

Olympic Dream vs. Vancouver Reality

With the close of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, much of the media was quick to declare them a total success. This goes against the mounds of journalism produced before and during the games by the Vancouver Media Co-op, the city’s newly launched independent media center. Believing that their might be more than one answer regarding the success of the games, and one of those should come from the host communities, The Real News spoke to Franklin López, Video Producer with the Co-op, to find out more about the legacy of the 2010 Olympics for the people of Vancouver.



Real News Network – March 04, 2010

Olympic dream vs. Vancouver reality

Media love-in with Winter Olympics challenged by city’s new journalist co-op

Franklin López is a video producer with the Vancouver Media Co-op. You can find the co-op at vancouver.mediacoop.ca. It is one of a series of similar projects getting started in Canada, currently there are also chapters in Toronto and Halifax. For the co-op’s coverage of the Olympics, go to 2010.mediacoop.ca

Should Fannie and Freddie be public utilities?

The Grim State of the States: Public Education Under Attack

Crossposted from Antemedius

Economist James Heintz is Associate Director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst.

Heintz has written on a wide range of economic policy issues, including job creation, global labor standards, egalitarian macroeconomic strategies, and investment behavior. He has worked as an international consultant on projects in Ghana and South Africa, sponsored by the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Development Program, that focus on employment-oriented development policy.

In 2000 Heintz co-authored with The Center for Popular Economics and Nancy Folbre The Ultimate Field Guide to the U.S. Economy: A Compact and Irreverent Guide to Economic Life in America, and is also author of a variety of other books and papers on employment and economics over the past decade or so.

His current work focuses on global labor standards, employment income, and poverty; employment policies for low- and middle-income countries; and the links between macroeconomic policies and distributive outcomes.

You Can’t Hijack This Thread

It’s a wide open thread. You can post on any subject you feel like talking about in here.

Politics, current affairs, war, earth changes, injustice, justice, good news, bad news, or even any kind of zoomed out off the friggin’ wall out to lunch in geosynchronous orbit or higher space aliens on acid poked in the third eye with a sharp stick whacked out stuff you can dream up!

After all…

For those who can master it, it’s a fine way to see the world. You get secret messages from the radio, TV, and most movies. You know God personally (so you don’t need Jesus as a go-between). The best ones can maintain their powers despite medication. Did you ever wonder about the existence of ghosts and angels and demons? Somebody had to have seen them, right? Now you know.

It begins for some when the trees start telling you their names. The flowers sing an inane little song like a children’s song that threatens to drone on indefinitely. There is another world, and it may contain well-organized squirrels. That famous karate guy doesn’t exist in the other world. But there’s plenty of paranoia to go around.

You would think that the ability to see angels, demons, and ghosts would give you special powers. Well, it doesn’t. You can’t usually talk to them. I prefer the plants. They speak clearly and use small words so the slower ones among us can follow. Unfortunately, most people aren’t even listening.

So let’s talk about heroes. Heroes are alive and well in the other world. Heroes love bats. Bats hate squirrels. Squirrels love trees. Trees love rain. Rain loves the night. The night loves heroes. Therefore, heroes know the insane who are being controlled by the squirrels. These people are insane, not Schizophrenic. True heroes know who they serve.

Cantor was a hero. And Godel was a hero. Godel saved us from the logicians (who had been influenced by the squirrels) by ending the tyranny of logic. Now not many people know this, but he simultaneously disproved ultimate logic while proving the existence of the other world. He saw it in a dream, which is, as we all know, the only way for a non-schizophrenic to experience the other world.

So enjoy! Knock yourself out! This thread is…

Safe As Milk

Well my cigarette died when I washed my face

Dropped some drops in an ashtray hit a wrong place

Woman at my blinds to see spiders spinning lines

It’s a safe as milk, it’s a safe as milk

I never heard it put quite that way

The shape I’m in is a gone a way

They called a day they called a day

Yesterday’s paper headlines approach rain gutter teasing rusty cat sneezing

Soppin’ wet hammer dusty and wheezing

Lusty alley whining trashcan blues

Children running after rainbows stocking poor

Gracious ladies nylon hanging on to line

Jumping onto leg looking mighty fine

Sorrows lollipop lands stick-broken on a dark carnival ground

Pop up toaster cracklin

Aluminium rhythm and sound

Ev’ry day pencil lazy and sharp

The icebox inside looking like a harp

E-lectric bulb been out for years

Freezer fumes feed the gas tears

Cheese in the corner with a mile long beard

Bacon blue bread dog eared (repeat twice)

I may be hungry but I sure ain’t weird

In the shuffling madness

of the locomotive breath his bipartisanship fantasy,

runs the all-time loser

headlong to his death

oh he feels the piston scraping

steam breaking on his brow

old Charlie stole the handle and

the train it won’t stop going

no way to slow down

The Death and Life of American Journalism

Crossposted from Antemedius

Bob McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois. In 2008, the Utne Reader listed McChesney among their “50 visionaries who are changing the world”. He has written and edited 17 books, and his work has been translated into 21 languages. John Nichols is The Nation’s Washington correspondent, and the associated editor of the Capital Times in Wisconsin. John has covered seven presidential races and reported from two dozen countries. He is the author or coauthor of eight books on media and politics.

McChesney and Nichols are co-authors of a new bookThe Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again“, described in review by Mike Francis of The Oregonian as “a book that diagnoses the collapse of traditional, commercial journalism and, as a solution, prescribes a dramatic recasting of the incentives and rewards that make the industry work” and looks “backward at the historical business and regulatory choices made by publishers, broadcasters and their enablers in Congress

Francis comments in his review that:

The authors are at their best when they point to critical turns during the formation of an independent press — turns, they suggest, that could have gone in the direction of far more state support. The American people, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1787, should be given “full information … thro’ the channel of public papers, and … these papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people.”

Also instructive are the sections devoted to the U.S. military’s support for a climate of press freedom in the defeated nations of Japan and Germany, both of which, not coincidentally, are full of flourishing newspapers today.

Here Paul Jay of The Real News interviews McChesney and Nichols together about their book and about the journalism industry in the United States and kicks off the discussion with:

…let’s start with some assumptions, ’cause we don’t have too long, and I don’t think they’re tough assumptions, which is: American journalism, in terms of its financial model, is broken; in terms of its substantive content model is pretty broken too, especially when you look at the capitulation of most of the media around the Iraq War and since. So talk just a bit about the problem, and then talk a little bit about the solutions.



Real News Network – February 25, 2010

transcript here

The Death and Life of American Journalism Pt.1

McChesney and Nichols: The market cannot generate sufficient journalism on its own

Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment For His Father

Go read this. Just go read it:

A Special Comment From My Father

by Keith Olbermann at Daily Kos

Load more