Showing posts with label corporate oligarchy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label corporate oligarchy. Show all posts
February 17, 2013
July 1, 2012
April 5, 2012
February 9, 2012
Citizens United and My Cassandra Complex
I made this video prior to the Citizens United vs FEC hearing.
Nobody cared then.
Now that everything is completely fucked up, people are asking, "why is everything so completely fucked up? How did we get here?"
Here's your answer:
Nobody cared then.
Now that everything is completely fucked up, people are asking, "why is everything so completely fucked up? How did we get here?"
Here's your answer:
October 16, 2011
October 15, 2011
The Corporate Elite are Standing Dead Wood
I don't know if you've ever been in an area of old growth forest, but often you'll come across a stand of trees that look like they are solid, but they are totally dead and rotten. They are filled with termite poop and dust, and even though they may be 6 feet around, a gentle nudge is enough to send them crumbling into piles of dust.
July 18, 2011
Fighting Back: Success Stories so far
When things are dismal, and corporate control of our lives seems utter and complete, it can seem like nothing can be done. That we might as well sit back and watch it all fall down, because we are powerless.
First, that is never true. The only difference between heroes and ordinary people is that heroes decide to act, while ordinary people continue to sit on the sidelines and feel powerless.
Second, here are some success stories of people banding together to fight back against the robber barons.
We hear over and over from Anarchists and Libertarians that the answer to our problems is less government. It's the fact that the government exists that is the reason why Corporate America is able to screw us over.
But that is not the case. Our government serves as a citizen's union so that we can collectively fight back against those who seek to control our lives.
The answer is not to get rid of our government-- That's exactly what the kleptocracy is already trying to do.
The answer is to USE our government.
We've been asleep at the wheel, and Corporate America has taken the wheel from us.
WE CAN TAKE IT BACK.
SOLIDARITY!
First, that is never true. The only difference between heroes and ordinary people is that heroes decide to act, while ordinary people continue to sit on the sidelines and feel powerless.
Second, here are some success stories of people banding together to fight back against the robber barons.
We hear over and over from Anarchists and Libertarians that the answer to our problems is less government. It's the fact that the government exists that is the reason why Corporate America is able to screw us over.
But that is not the case. Our government serves as a citizen's union so that we can collectively fight back against those who seek to control our lives.
The answer is not to get rid of our government-- That's exactly what the kleptocracy is already trying to do.
The answer is to USE our government.
We've been asleep at the wheel, and Corporate America has taken the wheel from us.
WE CAN TAKE IT BACK.
SOLIDARITY!
May 27, 2011
The One Percent
h/t to K.E. Harleston
1/8
2/8
3/8
4/8
5/8
6/8
7/8
8/8
And as a finisher:
Dennis Trainor's video "Anti-Obama rage is justified-- when will the poor threaten to kill and eat the rich?"
The One Percent
1/8
2/8
3/8
4/8
5/8
6/8
7/8
8/8
And as a finisher:
Dennis Trainor's video "Anti-Obama rage is justified-- when will the poor threaten to kill and eat the rich?"
April 13, 2011
Taking Progressives For Granted
Why allowing the Democratic Party to take your vote for granted gives them impunity to act like GOP douche-bags.
Originally from Nader.org
Article by Ralph Nader
When liberals and progressives have nowhere to go, New York’s new Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo can move toward the corporatist-right of the political spectrum with impunity. Brandishing an inherited $10 billion state deficit, Cuomo has earned the following description in the April 7th edition of The New York Times:
“He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive the state toward bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has helped finance the Tea Party movement….
“The man who began public life advocating for homeless people won passage of a state budget that makes steep cuts to schools, health care and social services. In a year when Wall Street posted record profits, Mr. Cuomo finally rejected a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy.”
Praised by the Wall Street Journal and the republican raptor, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who calls Andrew Cuomo “my soul mate,” the son of moral vision orator, former Governor Mario Cuomo, is on a roll unchallenged by his fellow Democrats and the media. Using the deficit—which is far less per capita than Connecticut’s deficit—he revels in being “Cuomo the cutter”: “I am a realist… Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers.”
Mr. Cuomo picks his numbers so that the cuts fall on the lower economic classes, the powerless along with the reviled public employee unions. Granted, there is waste fraud or ineffectiveness in many social service programs, but Governor Cuomo is cutting the programs indiscriminately without cutting them by squeezing out the waste and eliminating ineffective programs directly.
What results is that the wasteful practitioners know how to fight to preserve their programs better than the efficient ones do. The former have allies like well-connected corporate vendors with their procurement contracts.
But there is a more blatant misfocus by Cuomo. It is his fear of Wall Street whose crooks, speculators and self-enrichment pros collapsed the economy, looting or draining savings and pensions in 2008-2009 leading to much unemployment and many closed businesses that, through the loss of tax revenue, expanded the state deficit. He refuses even to speak about holding these spoiled, back-to-business-as-usual financial giants responsible.
On the contrary he is rejecting an extension of the tax surcharge on New Yorkers and residing foreigners who make over $200,000 dollars in income a year, which expires this December. It is so much easier to tax the faceless masses. Already, lower income New Yorkers pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in all taxes imposed than do the wealthy. Regressive!
It gets worse. During his campaign for Governor, Mr. Cuomo refused to even contemplate keeping the $14 billion (some estimate higher amounts) a year that the state collects from a century-old stock transfer tax, but instantly rebates, what is really a sales tax, back to the stock brokers. New York used to keep this tax revenue until the early Eighties, when Wall Street pressure finally prevailed. Green Party candidate for Governor, Howie Hawkins, during a public debate argued that keeping these revenues would eliminate the deficit and prevent the reduction of necessary programs. On that stage, Mr. Cuomo refused to engage. Mum’s the word on Wall Street’s fair share.
Cuomo calls himself “a progressive Democrat who’s broke.” A progressive Democrat would push for sacrifice at the wealthy top and work down if necessary. Many of the wealthy derived their billions and millions from many favored policies like tax leniency and other privileges and immunities including violation of the law (some of whom Cuomo pursued as Attorney General.)
After all corporate lobbyists work hard to produce many layers of favoritism, including selling products and services to the state government, that are as profitable as they are often wasteful. Consider, for example, the immense gouging in the outsourcing of CityTime—a large ongoing contract to computerize the New York City payroll (http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml).
The costs of health care reflect big time fraud in billing practices. Should a Governor just cut benefits across the board—stranding indigent patients to suffer or die—or should he crack down on the cheating and stealing that too many vendors have refined to perfection?
To be sure it is quicker to slice arbitrarily, but there is no indication that key cost-beneficial law enforcement budgets against business crime are going to increase on Governor Cuomo’s watch.
Mr. Cuomo did relent on one budget provision, which would have enriched the hospital and insurance lobbies placing a lifetime $250,000 cap on serious baby injuries from malpractice. That was too much to defend by this “progressive Democrat” in Albany. Credit the Center for Justice and Democracy for urging that good deed (www.centerjd.org).
How far will elected Democrats from the White House on down go in capitulating to the insatiable corporate dominators if their liberal/progressive base continues to signal that they politically have nowhere to go? These voters seem to have few visible breaking points on the dark horizon of over-reaching corporatism.
Originally from Nader.org
Article by Ralph Nader
When liberals and progressives have nowhere to go, New York’s new Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo can move toward the corporatist-right of the political spectrum with impunity. Brandishing an inherited $10 billion state deficit, Cuomo has earned the following description in the April 7th edition of The New York Times:
“He has clashed with unions, who he believes have helped drive the state toward bankruptcy. He has been praised by prominent conservatives like Sarah Palin and Rudolph W. Giuliani. And he has taken thousands of dollars in campaign money from the New York billionaire David H. Koch, who with his family has helped finance the Tea Party movement….
“The man who began public life advocating for homeless people won passage of a state budget that makes steep cuts to schools, health care and social services. In a year when Wall Street posted record profits, Mr. Cuomo finally rejected a politically popular income tax surcharge on the wealthy.”
Praised by the Wall Street Journal and the republican raptor, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who calls Andrew Cuomo “my soul mate,” the son of moral vision orator, former Governor Mario Cuomo, is on a roll unchallenged by his fellow Democrats and the media. Using the deficit—which is far less per capita than Connecticut’s deficit—he revels in being “Cuomo the cutter”: “I am a realist… Forget the philosophy. Here are the numbers.”
Mr. Cuomo picks his numbers so that the cuts fall on the lower economic classes, the powerless along with the reviled public employee unions. Granted, there is waste fraud or ineffectiveness in many social service programs, but Governor Cuomo is cutting the programs indiscriminately without cutting them by squeezing out the waste and eliminating ineffective programs directly.
What results is that the wasteful practitioners know how to fight to preserve their programs better than the efficient ones do. The former have allies like well-connected corporate vendors with their procurement contracts.
But there is a more blatant misfocus by Cuomo. It is his fear of Wall Street whose crooks, speculators and self-enrichment pros collapsed the economy, looting or draining savings and pensions in 2008-2009 leading to much unemployment and many closed businesses that, through the loss of tax revenue, expanded the state deficit. He refuses even to speak about holding these spoiled, back-to-business-as-usual financial giants responsible.
On the contrary he is rejecting an extension of the tax surcharge on New Yorkers and residing foreigners who make over $200,000 dollars in income a year, which expires this December. It is so much easier to tax the faceless masses. Already, lower income New Yorkers pay a slightly higher percentage of their income in all taxes imposed than do the wealthy. Regressive!
It gets worse. During his campaign for Governor, Mr. Cuomo refused to even contemplate keeping the $14 billion (some estimate higher amounts) a year that the state collects from a century-old stock transfer tax, but instantly rebates, what is really a sales tax, back to the stock brokers. New York used to keep this tax revenue until the early Eighties, when Wall Street pressure finally prevailed. Green Party candidate for Governor, Howie Hawkins, during a public debate argued that keeping these revenues would eliminate the deficit and prevent the reduction of necessary programs. On that stage, Mr. Cuomo refused to engage. Mum’s the word on Wall Street’s fair share.
Cuomo calls himself “a progressive Democrat who’s broke.” A progressive Democrat would push for sacrifice at the wealthy top and work down if necessary. Many of the wealthy derived their billions and millions from many favored policies like tax leniency and other privileges and immunities including violation of the law (some of whom Cuomo pursued as Attorney General.)
After all corporate lobbyists work hard to produce many layers of favoritism, including selling products and services to the state government, that are as profitable as they are often wasteful. Consider, for example, the immense gouging in the outsourcing of CityTime—a large ongoing contract to computerize the New York City payroll (http://www.nyc.gov/html/opa/html/about/city_time.shtml).
The costs of health care reflect big time fraud in billing practices. Should a Governor just cut benefits across the board—stranding indigent patients to suffer or die—or should he crack down on the cheating and stealing that too many vendors have refined to perfection?
To be sure it is quicker to slice arbitrarily, but there is no indication that key cost-beneficial law enforcement budgets against business crime are going to increase on Governor Cuomo’s watch.
Mr. Cuomo did relent on one budget provision, which would have enriched the hospital and insurance lobbies placing a lifetime $250,000 cap on serious baby injuries from malpractice. That was too much to defend by this “progressive Democrat” in Albany. Credit the Center for Justice and Democracy for urging that good deed (www.centerjd.org).
How far will elected Democrats from the White House on down go in capitulating to the insatiable corporate dominators if their liberal/progressive base continues to signal that they politically have nowhere to go? These voters seem to have few visible breaking points on the dark horizon of over-reaching corporatism.
March 26, 2011
Documentary: The History of American Corporatocacy
How every populist movement in the USA's history has been co-opted and perverted by Wall Street.
... And how we can prevent it from happening again.
Sub-headed “Barack Obama and the failure of capitalist democracy”, this film explores the historical role of the Democratic Party as the “graveyard of social movements”, the massive influence of corporate finance in elections, the absurd disparities of wealth in the United States, the continuity and escalation of neocon policies under Obama, the insufficiency of mere voting as a path to reform, and differing conceptions of democracy itself.
"Lifting the Veil is the long overdue film that powerfully, definitively, and finally exposes the deadly 21st century hypocrisy of U.S. internal and external policies, even as it imbues the viewer with a sense of urgency and an actualized hope to bring about real systemic change while there is yet time for humanity and this planet. See this film!"
-Larry Pinkney
Editorial Board Member & Columnist
The Black Commentator
Original Source: http://blip.tv/file/4911311
Original interview footage derives from Noam Chomsky, Michael Parenti, Michael Albert, John Stauber (PR Watch), Sharon Smith (Historian), William I. Robinson (Editor, Critical Globalization Studies), Morris Berman (Author, Dark Ages America), and famed black panther Larry Pinkney.
Non-original interviews/lectures include Michael Hudson, Paul Craig Roberts, Ted Rall, Richard Wolff, Glen Ford, Lewis Black, Glenn Greenwald, George Carlin, Gerald Cliente, Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Wollin and Martin Luther King.
“Lifting the Veil is a major contribution to political documentary. ; It teaches everyone from the uninitiated to the most sophisticated the true nature of the American government... It covers the issues clearly and succinctly, from the opening narrative through to its stirring conclusion.”
-Ralph Poynter
lynne stewart defense committee
new abolitionist movement
"The best political film I've seen to date. A must watch if you want to understand who and what Obama is about, as well as this hypocrisy they call democracy."
Kiilu Nyasha Independent Journalist and former member of the Black Panther Party
"Noble is brilliantly pioneering the new film-making -- incisive analysis, compelling sound and footage, fearless and independent reporting, and the aggregation of the best information out there into powerful, educational and free online feature films – all on a shoestring budget. His films educate and inform while building the movements needed for real change at the grassroots. Noble's films are dedicated to democracy; they fan the flames of non-violent, people-powered revolution." -John Stauber, Founder, PR Watch
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