Mar 05 2011
No need to say much as to an intro to this discussion, they, as usual, do a great job.
One thing I would like to say is that think Keith would be doin great if he picked up Laura and gave her a spot on the rebuild of that Gore and company TV Station.
She’s always done a great job when doing radio, her books, and now with this GRITtv venture, though to a to small an audience and Rachel’s still under contract to MSNBC.
Jan 05 2011
George Carlin said it bluntly a few years ago, and it was dismissed as comedy by more than a few who saw that it wasn’t – who saw that he he was using the comedic stage as a platform to deliver a serious warning, to pass on the truth as he saw it clearly:
They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting f*cked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f*ckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers – obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paper work, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.
And now they’re coming for your social security money.
They want your f*ckin’ retirement money. They want it back. So they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street.
Carlin was a unique talent – he had a stage presence that was fun to listen to and he had a way with phrasing and delivery that made the depressing message he had to pass on a little easier to swallow than dry facts would have.
Oct 02 2009
This is a thought-piece about whether democracy is worth anything at all in this era. I start with reflection upon a short paragraph from Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Democracy Against Capitalism, which suggests that elites both before and after capitalism have had a social basis for their assertions of privilege. The current assertion of privilege is substantiated by “money,” “property,” and “capitalism,” all of which are said to limit the sphere of democratic decisionmaking. But since “money,” “property,” and “capitalism” are the business of society, one must then question whether or not there is really anything left for democracy to decide, and whether people will actually get enough power to make democracy decide anything of substance.
(Crossposted at Big Orange)