The U.N. is an Apologist for False Climate Solutions| Jill Stein Interview

Originally posted at AcronymTV


A day before the People’s Climate March drove 400,000 people into the streets of New York City, Jill Stein sat down with Dennis Trainor, Jr of Acronym TV and outlined what she sees as the coming green revolution.

“The U.N. has sold us out,” says Stein “The UN has become the apologists for false solutions (like) nuclear power, fracking, and so-called clean coal,” says Stein. “The U.N. has sold us out, and it is really important that we take a new direction, with a very clear goal (…) one which puts people, planet and peace over profit.”



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Drones in Yemen, Hunger Games In America, and Corporate Espionage, Maine Moves to Amend

Originally posted at AcronymTV



On this episode of The Resistance Report:

1. Dennis Trainor, Jr. talks about the 15 innocent people in Yemen who were killed Thursday by a U.S. Drone attack. The 15 homicide victims will be called collateral damage, and yet we are not at war with Yemen. It is a country that, like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Somalia pose no threat to us and certainly have not declared war on us and yet, who contain within their borders members of an organization- Al-Qaeda- whose ranks will surely swell with each innocent victim whose bodies are pulverized at the click of a button from an Air Force pilot half a world away. 

2. We hear the haunting yet absurd steps taken by the NSA to monitor citizens. Unfortunately for activists, revolutionaries, and other agents of social change, that’s only the “state” prong of surveillance. The corporate arm is much more damning. Joel Northam reports. 

3. Donald Sutherland, who stars in the Hunger Games Franchise, wants to see a revolution that brings about the end of the American Empire, and he wants the Hunger Games movies to be a spark for that flame. Speaking to Rory Carroll of the Guardian UK, Sutherlandsays: "You know the young people of this society have not moved in the last 30 years." With the exception of Occupy, a minority movement, passivity reigns.” Whether Sutherland is engaging in a very clever marketing ploy or he sincerely wants to see a revolution is a question for another day. For now, Carl Gibson gives us this report that shows just how close we are to the dystopian futuristic landscape of the Hunger games. 

4. A group called We the People Maine went to the State House on Wednesday to deliver a formal request for the Legislature to apply for a Constitutional Convention of States to overturn Citizens United and establish that “corporations are not people and money is not speech.” Asher Platts was there, and files a report. 

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Things You'll Never Hear a Republican Say

Partisanship is counterproductive

Partisanship is a waste of time, and is counterproductive.
Why? Let's take a look at our enemy. Our enemy is not convervative voters. Our enemy is not joe the redneck down the road with an and a gunrack mounted in the back of his gunrack.
Our enemy is not your Republican Grandfather.
Our enemy are corporate oligarchs who are trying to undermine everything good that America is supposed to stand for, things like liberty, and justice for all. You know, that stuff from the Pledge of Allegiance. They own almost all the media you watch. They control what news you see. They own almost all the food you eat, and they want to genetically modify it. They own almost all the money in our economy too. How did things get here? Well Corporate Oligarchs don't waste their time with petty bullshit and partisanship.

Since they control the media, they control our access to our political candidates as well. During the presidential primaries, you don't get to see people like Dennis Kucinich, or Mike Gravel for more than a few minutes. When you're on GE's turf they set the rules. GE owns huge chunks of the military industrial complex, and candidates who want to end our global war on scary things get excluded from their debates. GE decides which candidate you should vote for.
Last election, GE and Lockheed Martin, and Verizon and all the rest decided that your candidates were going to be Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, and John Edwards. And funny enough, each of these candidates stated in their policy positions, which any chimpanzee with an internet connection can download and read from their campaign websites, that they were willing to bend over backwards to suck the collective cock of the corporate oligarchy-- sometimes called by folks like David Gergen, the “Business Community.”

Which is a terribly misleading name, because I know plenty of people who own businesses who aren't a part of that that community, and never will be. The community david gergen is talking about has expansive well-manicured lawns, tall iron-spiked fences surrounding it, a security guard at the gate, and gets around primarily by golf-cart.

The Corporate Oligarchs are playing their game in a post-partisan, post-national world. There is no Republicans or Democrats to them. There is no USA, China, European Union, African Union, etc. There is only the transnational corporation, free to rape and pillage the globe with impunity.

They're playing, 3-dimensional chess. When we get bogged down in partisan bullshit, cheering for the blue team or the red team, we're playing 2-d checkers on their 3-d chess board, and we wonder why we keep losing, and we can't possibly comprehend why we keep getting blindsided by triagonal unicorn moves.

It's not as simple as just never voting for another democrat or republican, because there are some good people out there in both parties, and we should work to keep the good ones we have, and get more good ones into position. Though this is certainly more the case in local politics than federal politics.

What we need to do is realize that:
1) The corporate oligarchs who run this whole damn show do not give a shit about you, and are purchasing our government to suit their own private interests
2) We can take our government back, but it will require a lot of hard work, and there's no guarantees.
3) If you are stuck in partisan bickering over bullshit distractions, step back and realize that there are four other chess boards that this game is being played on.

Laibach: Divided States of America

So Laibach is a band from a nation that no longer exists: Yugoslavia

They are part of the Neue Slowenische Kunst or NSK artistic movement, which uses a retrospective avant-garde aesthetic, borrowing from and combining conflicting ideologies to create an aesthetic both authentic feeling, and nonsensical.

They toured the USA just after the 2004 election, and while here, they documented the political, social, and psychological climate here.

It's interesting to watch this now, hearing people's critiques of Bush at the time, the critiques of the wars at the time, etc.

I can't shake the feeling that I'm actually watching a documentary on the fall of the Soviet Empire. But there it is, it's us. It's our empire that's crumbling now.

What becomes really apparent for me, is how the duopoly of two corporate, pro-war political parties, have deeply divided our nation politically into two opposing camps that fight essentially for the same team.

Until we get beyond this illusion that we have two different political parties that serve different masters, we're going to keep driving America into the same corporatocratic ditch every two years.

Below is their documentary: Divided States of America, in which a friend of mine makes a cameo.

I personally feel that this film's message culminates in section 6 with a reading by NSK luminary Peter Mlakar.

Maddow: It's not about the budget

They just don't give a fuck

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

To quote Chris Hedges,

"Totalitarianism, George Orwell pointed out, is not so much an age of faith but an age of schizophrenia. "A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial," Orwell wrote. "That is when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud."

Our elites have used fraud. Force is all they have left. Our mediocre and bankrupt elite is desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved. More importantly, they are trying to save themselves. . "

Working People vs Wall Street part 2

Now, I never aim to inspire defeatism, but today I aim to inspire disillusionment, which is a very different thing. I think we can all agree it’s a good thing to be without illusion, and right now there are far too many of us who believe in this illusion that the folks at the top got their through legitimate means, and maintain their position through legitimate means, that The Man’s game is a fair one.

The Man? Yeah. Normally, I don’t like abstractions like this, but for the sake of understanding our economic situation, I find it’s easier to understand if we lump the so called “captains of industry” together into one entity. If we lump the Wall Street Banks, the Globalist Chemical Companies, the Globalist Factory Farms, the Military Industrial Complex, everything that isn’t Labor, into one entity. Because it really is, us versus them.

Right now we’ve got a Republican President who is pretending to be a Democrat, and we’ve got a Republican Party who is trying to send our nation back to the time of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We had a regressive corporate shill in Clinton who totally fucked working people of America over with NAFTA and the WTO. We had regressive corporate shills in GW Bush and Reagan who busted unions and rolled back labor protections, environmental protections, consumer safety protections, all in the name of the fuckers at the top making shit loads of money while you die of cancer because of their pollution in your air, water and soil.

An illusion we need to dispense with is that we all share equally in our nation's prosperity, that a rising tide lifts all boats, as it were.

Truth is, as the rich get richer, we get poorer, which is clearly demonstrated by this chart you can view over at StateOfWorkingAmerica.org

The lower 90% of Americans, by income bracket, have actually seen their mean wages decline since 1977, while the top 1% by income bracket, have seen their income balloon wildly, seeing their already absurdly high income triple, while our income has declined. We’re working more today, for less money.

Another illusion is that most people you know are middle class. This is bullshit, pure and simple.

Most people who think that they are middle class are actually working poor, and hover just above the poverty line.

I see the Tea Party protesters out there in Wisconsin, complaining that they don’t have a right to organize, or to strike, or to call in sick. Well, dipshits, it’s because you don’t have a fucking union. If you had one, YOU TOO could enjoy the right to strike, and would probably get higher wages. Instead of pissing and moaning about how the Union Labor gets all the bennies, why don’t you get off your lazy ass, risk getting fired, and through months and months of hard work, organize a union and get a better standard of living for yourself?

And to the Union Labor in WI, who is saying publicly that they’re willing to negotiate all their benefits away... This isn’t a time to be negotiating. This is a time to get aggressive. Shit is getting serious, people are losing their homes, the whole fucking economic system is collapsing, and people are suffering. This is the time to go for the whole goddamn cake.

Why? Well, there’s something you should know:
It was never in the plans for you to make any money, to make anything of yourself.
It was never in the plans for anybody but the rich, the REALLY rich, to get ahead in life.

That is an illusion started with the Horatio Algers stories of rags to riches. We love these stories here in America. They show real life examples once and a while as fluff peices on the nightly news. But these cases are extreme statistical outliers, you’re more likely to get rich playing the lotto than by working hard and keeping your head down. It doesn’t matter that it’s never going to fucking happen to you. The Rags to Riches story still a cornerstone of the American Dream. But Horatio Algers wrote fiction, and dreams are fantasies experienced while asleep.

You are poor. How do I know? I don’t. But by pure statistics alone, I’m certain you are. You might be in denial about this, but the truth remains, you’re poor.

You’re just one severe illness away from being homeless, and losing everything, but maybe you don’t know it. There are middle class people, people with insurance, who get cancer, cap out on their claims, lose everything, and die homeless. And with cancer rates rising every passing year, this is lottery game you’re far more likely to win.

Unless things begin to change, and I mean REALLY CHANGE, you're going to be poor FOREVER, too. And your kids are going to be poor. My generation is the first generation that will do worse than their parents. Not because we’re lazy, but because the free-market economic system is collapsing in on us, and we’re being forced to take shittier jobs, without union protection, without benefits, with lower wages. Thanks to NAFTA and the WTO, my generation has to compete with children in China who are literally working for rice. We have to compete with workers in Mexico who get paid 7 cents and hour. Unless we change things, we’re going to keep getting poorer and poorer.

When you get poorer, the rich get even richer.

How? That’s just the rules of the game. The game called “Free Market Capitalism.”

The Super Rich, the parasites down on Wall Street, they own the whole goddamn Monopoly game. They own the playing board, they own the shoe and the thimble and the scottish terrier, they own the dice, and they own the money. They are The Man. We all play by their rules. Don’t beleive me? Have you checked your credit score lately? Oh, it doesn’t look so good does it. Maybe that’s because you have too much credit card debt. Or not enough credit card debt. Or maybe you don’t pay your statements off fast enough. Or maybe you pay your balance off too fast. Or maybe it’s just all just fucking bullshit set up by the bankers on Wall Street to control your spending habits so they can steal even more of your goddamn money by making interest off of your debt.

So, What are the rules?

The rules go like this: you work for them your whole life, give up every waking moment to earn that money that you so desperately need to stay alive, and then when you get it, you pay rent back to your capitalist master for permission to keep living. So that you can keep living to do what? To keep working, until you get too old to work and become either social securities problem, or if social security is gone by then, you become your kids problem. And if your kids can’t support you because they’re competing against workers in Mexico who get 7 cents an hour, then you end up on the street curb with the rest of the trash that nobody wants.

You’re a fool to think that the money you earn is ever really yours. That money is owned by The Man, and he’s only lending it to you temporarily, so that you THINK you’re making progress. They’ll take it back from you soon enough. And no I’m not talking about taxes. The Man gives you just enough of their money so that you stay just happy enough, or just confused enough, that you don’t fully realize you’re being totally fucked every moment of your life.

Every breath you take, they are snatching their money back from you. You want to buy food so you don’t starve to death, you pay The Man. You pay Kraft Foods, Inc and you pay Con Agra and you pay Monsanto. You can’t get to your job by public transport so you have to buy a car. You get your loan to buy your from The Man.

The Man charges you interest on this new debt you just created, and The Man immediately begins to trade your debt with his buddies, as if it were money.

If time is money, it stands to reason that money is time, and when you are in debt, you owe your time on this earth to the Man. When the man is trading your debt like money, what he’s really doing is trading your life away. He is selling derivatives on his ownership of your every breath. He’s trading in futures of YOU, with the implicit guarantee that you’ll keep slaving your sorry ass to the bone so that The Man can turn more profits, because you promised to give The Man back all the money he just gave you and then some.

So now you’re working for The Man for free. How does it feel to be a slave? Shut up, go watch TV. Don’t talk politics. How dare you question America, the greatest best country on earth that god ever gave to man? Gave to man? Or gave to The Man?

Judge calls healthcare mandate unconstitutional

Click here for the article in the Wall Street Journal.

Personally, I think this is a victory.

WHAT?! The Obamatons say.

Chill, let me explain.

The parts of the bill requiring health insurance companies to cover everybody, regardless of pre-existing conditions, still stand.

And the shittiest part-- forcing people to buy private insurance, the one part that the INSURANCE COMPANIES liked best, is facing the axe.

This kind of reminds me of the time that republicans accidentally banned straight marriage.

Victory! (for now).

And to all the Obamatons who think that this past Healthcare bill was the best idea ever, listen up:
Mandating insurance for health is different than mandating insurance for driving a car.
Anybody can choose to not drive and still go about their business.
Health Insurance, through this bill, is a requirement of being alive.
And there's only one way to choose to stop being alive-- and it makes it really difficult to go about your day. (I'm talking about suicide folks).

DADT vote fails; my thoughts

Even after Obama caved on the tax cuts, the GOP has thanked him by... giving him NOTHING.

Driving home from work today, I was scanning the radio, and came across what turned out to be Sean Hannity's radio show. He was talking about how the blame doesn't rest entirely on the shoulders of the GOP, and that the Democrats should stop Demonizing the GOP when the Democrats vote the same way.

I think this may be the first time I actually agree with Sean Hannity.

Democrats voted with Republicans in blocking DADT.

Now, I've been following politics, and working on campaigns since I was in high school. Let me let you in on a little secret that I've learned along the way: Federal Level Politicians don't give a shit about you, or your issues, unless they can use them to get you to vote for them.

That's right! I know-- shocking. Politicians lie through their teeth about what they are going to get done when you elect them. Why? Because most don't see themselves as beholden to you. They are beholden to their monied donors. Are you rolling in cash? Then who gives a fuck what you have to say?

But that's not all. There's a second half to this equation. You, the voter, make yourself irrelevant every fucking election cycle by buying into their bullshit. That if you don't elect the Democrat/Republican the gays will; be put in camps/destroy America.

They don't give a shit about gay marriage. They don't give a shit about DADT. It's a wedge issue, as I cover in this video:



It hitting your head against the wall hurts your head, maybe you should stop doing it. Stop voting for people who lie to you.

THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU AT ALL.

Footage of Laura Wells Arrest at the NBC hosted CA Gubernatorial Debates

To all of you who keep saying, "if voting changed things, they'd make it illegal."

Well, voting DOES change things, but instead of making voting illegal, they've just decided to make attending a debate while being a member of the Green Party illegal instead.

STRATEGY

Help keep this show going.

Obama's Speech: pros, cons, the nitty gritty of the public option

And now for something I NEVER do, an actual blog entry. Hey, videos take time.

SO:

The details of the Public Option are not new, if you've done any research on your own, but since most Americans haven't, it was nice to see the details laid out in Obama's speech-- though I think that with some of the new compromises, such as the trigger mechanisms to cut spending if cost savings aren't realized, if adopted, would pretty much doom the plan to fail. Which I think is the point. Private insurance is scared shitless right now, and they are doing everything they can to kill this thing (just like they do with 12% their customers every year).

The details of the plan, more or less, are as follows: The Public Option will be a non-profit insurance company, like the Postal Service is for mail, and will NOT be subsidized by the tax payer-- directly. If you can't afford the plan, then you will get a voucher to assist you to buy one, either from a private insurance company, or from the public option. While that sounds nice, it's a contrived way of routing government money into private insurance subsidies via the consumer. It wouldn't be so bad if the government simply subsidized people who could not afford insurance, or if they just gave anybody who wanted to sign up for Medicare, a Medicare card.

But with the mandate on the individual to purchase health insurance, (which the Republicans also support), everybody has to buy a plan, and so every citizen effectively becomes a way for the government to funnel federal money, through your forced purchase of a plan, to the insurance companies. This is supposed to drive down costs by increasing the market and spreading the risk across the whole of society, but I'm highly skeptical that it will have any effect. Afterall, the profit motive in insurance IS the problem, which thankfully Obama recognized, when he talked about the former CEO of an insurance company who talked about how insurance companies are rewarded for denying claims and denying care to the ill. But without pushing for Medicare for All, it's just a rhetorical victory on the part of progressives, not anything useful as far as policy goes.



The key reforms sought by Obama are as follows:

1) Make it illegal to deny claims based on pre-existing conditions.
2) Make it illegal to change the terms of the plan you purchase.
3) Create a health insurance exchange, through which Americans can do what Wal*Mart and Sam's Club does, which is use collective purchasing power at large volume to reduce costs to the individual.

Obama hedged on the cost, rather than saying one trillion, over the course of ten years, he said "over 900 billion" which sounds less scary, but means the same thing, which also isn't scary.
It is, as Obama was smart to point out, less than we've spent in Iraq or Afghanistan.

I thought it was sad that, even though the President dispelled the myths and disinformation that the Republicans have been spreading, the Republican response speech held afterward was to repeat the very lies and disinformation that were dispelled not ten minutes prior. Claims like "Medicare is going to be cut by $200 billion."

While it is factually true that within Medicare there will be a cut of $200 billion dollars, the cuts are coming from subsidies to insurance companies, which is wasted money. Medicare doesn't need to hire an insurance company to pay out doctor's bills. Medicare can pay doctor's bills on it's own, without losing money to an insurance company skimming corporate profits off the top on the way there.
What's more, is that this cut money is then being redistributed and then spent within the medicare program, so that the net effect is that there is no cut, and that rather than going to corporate profits, more money is going to medical expenses-- which is what Medicare is designed to do. So it's not actually a cut, but a reallocation of funds.

Republicans claim that there were many misstatements in Obama's speech. On that point I can agree. Obama said, "health insurance CEOs aren't bad people."
That is false. To run such a business, and to know that your decisions to increase your profits would kill 18,000 people every year, would require a total divorce with any human decency or sense of morality. Such a person would not be a good person by any standard I can think of. A good person would have a sense of human decency and a sense of morals, of right and wrong.

Another thing that upset me quite a bit, was when Obama mentioned that young healthy people choose not to purchase health insurance because they are willing to take the risk. FUCK THAT-- I don't have insurance because it's fucking expensive, and I'm broke as shit. I would LOVE to have health insurance. Sign me up for Medicare right now! Just don't criminalize my poverty, because I won't be able to afford to purchase one. My car just died, and I can barely afford to fix that, let alone make additional monthly payments on some private plan that is going to overcharge me, and then won't even provide any benefits when I need them. And the individual mandate, in effect, criminalizes poverty. That really sucks.

Obama said that he intends to be the last president to take up the issue of health care reform. I don't know what that is supposed to mean. These reforms are timid, the mandates are wrong-headed, and what's been put forth so far is certainly a far cry from actually fixing what's wrong with our health insurance market here in America.

I know that this isn't an important part of the speech, but it was thrilling to see the joint session erupt with protests from the Republican members of congress when Obama addressed head on the lies that have been propagated. I think the president should be required to speak at the joint session more often, like once a month, so that it would be more like the British House of parliament.
It was certainly a stark contrast between the Republicans protesting the lies being confronted head-on and dismissed tonight, versus the joint sessions that the Bush administration held after September 11th, and then leading up to the Iraq war, where everybody in Congress was silent. The Democrats sat idly by and were very quiet. No boos or disruptions. And that was when we were talking about killing people. Now we are trying to save lives, and the Republicans are hooting and hollering in protest, with one Republican from South Carolina yelling and calling the president a liar. An interesting contrast to note.

Republicans also held up pieces of paper, which I thought was a stupid form of protest, if indeed that's what it was. It made no sense whatsoever on the home TV. I'm sure THEY knew what the significance of those papers were, but nobody at home on their couches did. With the protesting and the hooting and hollering, they came across as having totally lost it, which they probably have. They were from the House, after all. There was one congressperson with a sheet of paper in his lap with the words written, "What Bill?" in large black ink letters. This one protest I thought was valid and does bring up a good point; there are currently something like six different bills, one of which is HR 676, another-- and the one that Democrats are usually talking about, is HR 3200. There are others as well, but they propose the creating of small co-opts that wouldn't have the bargaining power to lower costs like the health insurance exchange proposed in HR 3200.

Obama did a great thing with the last ten minutes of his speech, calling into question the idea that government itself is somehow un-American. It was a rebuttal to the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of Reagan and Goldwater that though meek, has been LONG overdue. There once was a time when Republicans ran on a platform increasing welfare spending, like Richard Nixon, or Dwight Eisenhower, for instance. Obama made an emotional and philosophical appeal, but I think it's one that is much needed for the sake of the public debate. If those sound-bytes are the one that end up being repeated over and over in the 24 hour news cycle, health insurance reform will be a cinch, and it will hopefully mark the turn of the tide away from that anarcho-capitalist, nonsense. Or as Evo Morales calls it, "Barbarian Capitalism."