Breaking The Mold

Reject Florida's Privatization Bills!

2012-01-30T22:10:00.000-05:00

Keep our communities safe and our people employed.

Source: SignOn

By: Christina Bullins

To be delivered to: The Florida State House, The Florida State Senate, and Governor Rick Scott:

I oppose SB 2036 and SB 2038. These bills are being pushed by corporate lobbyists to privatize governmental services and agencies without public input. These bills will compromise public safety, cause unemployment, and hurt communities and small businesses across Florida.

Gov. Rick Scott and some Florida legislators are rushing full steam ahead to enact legislation, specifically SB 2036 and SB 2038, that would privatize governmental services and agencies without public input. They are trying to pass these bills as early as THIS WEEK.

These bills will compromise public safety, cause unemployment, and hurt communities and small businesses across Florida.

This scheme starts with immediate plans to privatize 29 prisons in 18 counties in south and central Florida with NO EXIT STRATEGY should things go wrong. No other state in our nation has given contracts to private prisons at even close to this level.

As a correctional officer, I know firsthand that if this bill passes, many of my fellow officers will be out of a job. Families and children of my fellow officers will be uprooted. In some communities, this will significantly alter public school funding. There are literally thousands of public servants whose families will be impacted if this bill becomes law!

These bills are physically and economically dangerous, and the effects irreversible. Here’s just some of what they’d do:

• Squander taxpayer money to reward political donors. Florida is already riddled with past and present issues of corruption, over-billing, mismanagement and failure to maintain our public facilities by privately-run correctional corporations. Enough is enough!

• Hurt small businesses across Florida. Unemployment will rise. The officers that will be hired will be paid less. This means less money spent in our communities.

• Put your family’s safety on the line. Did you know that private prisons do not chase escaped inmates past the perimeter like the public prisons do, which means more escaped prisoners in our communities? And private prison corporations have often failed to live up to legal requirements in the past. This bill will just make the problem worse.

Click Here to Sign Christina's Petition

Say No to ACTA

2012-01-24T00:04:00.001-05:00

ACTA is the abbreviation for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement --- an international agreement to establish new standards on enforcing intellectual property rights.

ACTA would create a separate governing body outside of existing international organizations, including WTO (World Trade Organization), WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and the UN (United Nations).

Though the bulk of the negotiations and resulting documents have been kept secret with virtually no transparency, it is clear from both the leaked and released statements and documents that ACTA will infringe upon privacy, civil liberties, legitimate commerce, innovation and freedom on the internet.

Currently Australia, the Republic of Korea, New Zealand, Mexico, Jordan, Morocco, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, United States, the EU, Switzerland and Japan are the countries involved in the negotiations.

The time to act against ACTA is NOW.

Learn More about ACTA

Click Here To Read The Leaked Text of ACTA

Platini: Wake Up

2012-01-20T20:06:00.001-05:00

Wake Up: The 2012 Theory by Platini

Save the Internet

2012-01-18T01:12:00.000-05:00

Thanks to a broad and bipartisan coalition of Internet users, companies, and organizations, the U.S. House of Representatives has now put the brakes on SOPA, a deeply flawed bill that would use Internet censorship to combat overseas copyright infringement.

Whilethe White House appears to have joined the opposition, Obama has not yet expressed whether or not he would veto such a bill if it came before him for signature.

The Senate is continuing to move forward — and fast — with its equally dangerous version of the bill, called PIPA, the Protect-IP Act. As written, PIPA would import censorship and surveillance techniques pioneered by countries like China and Iran, reversing longstanding U.S. policy on Internet freedom, betraying U.S. First Amendment values, damaging our standing around the world, threatening our job-creating innovators, and undermining Internet security for everyone.

Today is a day for action across the Internet. Learn about these destructive bills. Tell your representatives what you think.

What else can you do? Urge President Obama to veto SOPA and PIPA.

Jeremy Rifkin: Empathic Civilization

2012-01-13T16:48:00.004-05:00

"The Empathic Civilization is emerging. A younger generation is fast extending its empathic embrace beyond religious affiliations and national identification to include the whole of humanity and the vast project of life that envelops the Earth." - Jeremy Rifkin

In this excellent RSA Animate bestselling author, political adviser and social and ethical prophet Jeremy Rifkin investigates the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society:

Here is a somewhat revised transcript of the presentation, originally posted by States of Consciousness:

In the last ten years there’s been some very interesting developments in evolutionary biology, neuro-cognitive science, child development, research, and many other fields which is beginning to challenge some of the long-held shibboleth we’ve had about human nature and the meaning of human journey.

But there is another frame of reference emerging in the sciences which is quite interesting and really challenging these assumptions. And with that the institutions that we have created based on those assumptions: our educational institutions, our business practices, our governing institutions etc.

Let me take you back to the early 1990s. Sleepy little laboratory in Parma, Italy and scientist had a MRI brain scanning machine on a Macaque monkey, as a Macaque monkey was trying to open up a nut. They wanted to see how the neurons would light up. So the monkey is trying to open up a nut, the neurons light up. And just by serendipity, that is how science sometimes happens, a human being walked in the laboratory. I don’t know if it was by mistake, and he was hungry and he saw the nuts and he opened up one of the nuts and he tried to wrap it opened. The Macaque monkey was totally shocked, because who was this invader in the laboratory? And he didn’t move he just gazed at the man trying open up a nut just like he had done a few seconds earlier. And then the scientist looked at he MRI brain scan and the same exact neurons were lighting up when he observed the human being opening the nut as when the monkey opened the nut and the scientist had not clue as to what this was. They thought the MRI machine had broken.

They than began to put MRI brain scanning machines on other primates especially chimpanzees with their big neo cortex, than they went to humans. And what they found over and over again is something called mirror neurons. And that is that we are apparently softwired to some of the primates: all humans, we suspect elephants, we’re not sure about dolphins and dogs. We’ve just begun, but all humans are softwired with mirror neurons so that if I’m observing you: your anger, your frustration, your sense of rejection, your joy, whatever it is and I can feel what you’re doing, the same neurons would light up in me as if I’m having that experience myself. Now this isn’t all that unusual, we know if a spider goes up to someone’s arm and I’m observing it going up your arm I’m gonna get a creepy feeling.

We take this for granted, but we are actually softwired to actually experience another’s plight as we are experiencing ourselves. But mirror neurons are just begging of a whole range of research going on in neuro-psychology, brain research and child development that suggests that we are actually softwired not for aggression and violence, and self-interest, and utilitarianism. That we are actually softwired for sociability, attachment, as John Bowlby might have said, affection, companionship. And that the first drive is the drive to actually belong, it’s an empathic drive.

What is empathy? It’s very complicated. When little babies are in nursery, and one baby cries, the other baby would cry in response. They just don’t know why. That’s empathic distress, it’s built into their biology. Around 2.5 years of age a child actually can begin recognize himself in the mirror. That’s when you begin to mature empathy as a cultural phenomenon. And there is once a toddler can identify themselves, then they know that if they’re observing someone else have a feeling, they know that if they feel something it’s because they’re feeling it because someone else has it. They are two separate beings.

Self-hood goes together with empathic development: increasing self-hood, increasing empathic development. Around 8 years of age a child learns about birth and death. They learn where they came from, that they have one and only life, that life is fragile and vulnerable, and that one day they’re gonna die.

That’s the beginning of existential trip. Because when a child learns about birth and death and they have one and only life, they realize how fragile and vulnerable life is. It’s very tough being live on this planet, whether you’re a human being or a fox navigating the forest.

So when the child learns the life is vulnerable and fragile and every moment is precious and that they have their own unique history, it allows child then to experience another’s plight in the same way. That that other person or other being could be another creature that has a one and only life, it’s tough to be alive, and the odds are not always good.

So if you think about the times that we’ve empathized with each other or fellow creatures it’s always because we felt their struggle, we have with the depth of empathy and the celebration of life. And we show solidarity with our compassion.

Empathy is the opposite of utopia. There is no empathy in heaven, I guarantee you, I’d tell you before you get there. There isn’t any empathy in the heaven because there is no mortality. There is no empathy in utopia, because there is no suffering. Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgment of death and the celebration of life and rooting for each other to flourish and be. It’s based on our frailties and our imperfections. So when we’re talking about building an empathic civilization, we’re not talking about utopia, we’re talking about the ability of human being to show solidarity not only with each other, but our fellow creatures who have one and only life on this little planet.

We are Homo empathicus. So here is the question. We know the consciousness changes in history. The way our brain is wired today is not the way in medieval serf’s brain would be wired. And their brain wouldn’t be the same as wiring of a forger hunter thirty thousand years ago. So the question I asked at the beginning of this study, six years ago, is how does consciousness change in history? Because I want to imagine the following propositions, is it possible that we human beings were softwired for empathic distress? Is it possible that we could actually extend our empathy to the entire human race, as an extended family, and to our fellow creatures, as part of our evolutionary family, and to the biosphere as our common community?

If it’s possible to imagine that, than we may be able to save our species and save our planet. And when I say to you tonight if it’s impossible to imagine than I don’t see how we’re going to make it! Empathy is the invisible hand. Empathy is what allows us to stretch our sensibility with another so that we can cohere in larger social units. To empathize is to civilize, to civilize is to empathize.

With forger hunter societies, communication only extended to the local tribe and shouting distance. Everyone over at the next mountain was an alien other. So empathy only extended to blood ties. When we went to the great hydraulic agricultural civilizations script allowed us to extend the nervous system and to annihilate more time and space and bring more people together. And the differentiation of skills and the increasing self-hood not only let the theological consciousness, but empathy now extended to a new fiction. And that is instead of just associating with one’s blood ties we detribalize and began associations based on religious ties.

So a new fiction, Jews started see all other Jews as extended family and empathize with Jews. Christians start to see all other Christians as extended family and empathize with Christians. Muslim the same. When we get to the nineteenth century industrial revolution and we extend markets now to larger areas and create a fiction called the Nation State. And all of the sudden the Brits start to see others in Britain as extended family and the Germans start to see Germans as extended family, the Americans as Americans.

There was no such thing as Germany, there was no such thing as France, these are fictions, but they allow us to extend our family so that we can have loyalties and identities based on the new complex energy communication revolutions we have that annihilate time and space. But if we have gone from empathy and blood ties to empathy and religious associational ties to empathy based on national identification, is it really big stretch to imagine the new technologies allowing us to connect our empathy to the human race writ large in a single biosphere? And what reason would we stop here at the national state identity and only have ideological empathy or theological base empathy or tribal based blood tie empathy?

We have the technology that allows us to extend the central nervous system and think viscerally as a family, not just intellectually. When that earthquake hit Haiti and then Chili, but especially Haiti, within an hour the twitters came out, and within two hours some cell phone videos on the YouTube, and within three hours the entire human race was in an empathic embrace coming to the aid of Haiti.

If we were, as the enlightened philosophers suggested, materialistic, self-interested, utilitarian, pleasure seeking, it couldn’t account to the response to Haiti. Apparently, 175,000 years ago in a rift valley of Africa there were about 10,000 anatomically modern human beings walking the [...], our ancestors.

The geneticists located one data base woman, it’s a data base line, apparently her genes passed everyone in this room tonight, the other ladies didn’t make it. It gets even more strange. They located a single male, this is a data base line for geneticists. They call it the Y-chromosome “Adam,” apparently a fairly potent guy. His genes passed everyone in this room.

So here is the news. Six point eight (6.8) billions people various stages of consciousness: theological, ideological, psychological, dramaturgical. We’re all fighting with each other with different ideas about the world, and guess what, we’re all came from two people. The Bible got this one right, we couldn’t come from many. But the point is we have to begin thinking as an extended family. We have to broaden our sense of identity. We don’t lose the old identities of nationhood and our religious identities, and even our blood ties. But we extend our identities so we could think of the human race as our fellow sojourners, and our other creatures here as part of our evolutionary family and the biosphere is our community.

We have to rethink the human narrative. If we are truly Homo Empathicus, than we need to bring out that core nature, ‘cause if we doesn’t come out and it’s repressed by our parenting, our educational system, our business practicing and government, the secondary drives come: the narcissism, the materialism, the violence, the aggression. If we can have a global debate, let us start here from the British Royal Society for the Arts, which apparently we’re doing. To begin rethinking human nature, to bring out our empathic sociability, so that we can rethink the institutions of society and prepare the ground work for empathic civilization.

Click here for more of my favorite RSA Animates

1.18.12 Blackout Against Censorship

2012-01-13T02:55:00.000-05:00

Next Wednesday, January 18th, Reddit and other sites will black out in solidarity against the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act --- two pieces of legislation that if passed would devastate the Free Internet as we know it.

This is good news considering public outcry hasn't reached the level it should be.

With 60 million people using WordPress hopefully this will be the kind of push the people need to join the fight to stop Censorship.

Click here to help urge Wikipedia to join in the protest.

Learn more here.

Join the fight via stopcensorship.org, americancensorship.org and demandprogress.org

For updates throughout the day follow me or PplOverPolitics on Twitter.

Don't just sign a petition --- share this information with everyone you can, before it's too late...

#J18

#BlackOut

What A Totally Honest Politician Would Say

2012-01-11T14:49:00.003-05:00

"For the last 15 years I've lived my life in such a bland, uncontroversial and repressed manner that it's almost unnatural. Why? Because I've been preparing to be your representative since I was a child.

Most well-adjusted, sane men would be hesitant to take a job where there decisions would so drastically effect the lives of so many, but not me. I possess a sort of "Sociopathic Narcissism" that makes me think that I should be in charge of everyone. But all that needs to start here at home which I've grown to love since I moved here 18 months ago."

"My soul is terrifying..."

- Clint Webb

Support the Saving American Democracy Amendment

2012-01-10T12:00:00.000-05:00

Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment that would overturn the Supreme Court decision in a case called Citizens United vs. FEC.

The Saving American Democracy Amendment states that:

- Corporations are not persons with constitutional rights equal to real people.
- Corporations are subject to regulation by the people.
- Corporations may not make campaign contributions or any election expenditures.
- Congress and states have the power to regulate campaign finances.

Click Here To Sign Senator Sanders' Petition to Support the Saving American Democracy Amendment

Pass it on...

2012-01-06T01:02:00.000-05:00

In the following interview, Retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson discusses with Alyona how the NDAA is the Road to Tyranny:

Occupy Wall Street meets McCarthyism?

See Also:

National Lawyers Guild Condemns NDAA

The Fake War On Terror Continues

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans

Cornel West and Carl Dix: Pursuing Justice in the Age of Obama

2012-01-05T13:54:00.002-05:00

Source: Truthout

With the world in transition, and the future so unclear, what kind of promises can we make to our children?

What can we do to ensure a just world for them?

And what are the youth doing now to make it happen for themselves?

Click the image below to listen to Princeton University professor Cornel West and Revolutionary Communist Party USA spokesman Carl Dix talk about the future of America’s youth in the age of Obama.

Medical Marijuana: Logical, Compassionate & Scientifically Sound

2012-01-04T15:15:00.000-05:00

Cathy Jordan has been living with Lou Gehrig's Disease for nearly 30 years. On February 22, 1997, she came out publicly about the medicine that saves her life. 15-years later, she is still fighting for her life saving medicine.

Help her ask Governor Scott to apply logic, compassion and science to the cannabis debate, and then press lawmakers to have a bill to legalize cannabis medicine ready for his signature:

To the Honorable Governor of Florida,

We the undersigned support safe, legal access to cannabis medicine for people. We believe science, logic, human compassion, and the proven economic impact all support allowing Floridians and their healthcare providers to consider cannabis as an alternative medicine.

This session, Representatives and Senators are considering HJR 353 and SJR 1028. They propose a Constitutional Amendment to allow the medicinal use of cannabis to be placed on the ballot in 2012. Upon passage of the amendment, the legislature would have to pass guidelines in 2013.

Don’t make Florida patients wait another day – let alone 18 months – for access to a proven medicine enjoyed under the cover of state law for over 33% of Americans.

We urge you to enjoin your Representatives and Senators to write and pass a new Bill to allow medicinal use of cannabis by Florida citizen effective immediately upon your signature.

We further urge you to join Governor Chaffee of Rhode Island and Governor Gregorie of Washington in their “Request to Reschedule Cannabis” filed with the DEA, FDA, Department of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General of the United States.

Opening cannabis to research means huge potential for the pharmaceutical industry, but it also creates jobs and economic activity in states that allow medical use.

Licensing of patients and growers/caregivers and tax revenue would be a financial benefit to the state. Legalizing the medicinal use of cannabis will create a new industry and stream of revenue, putting millions of dollars in our state’s coffers. It would create thousands of jobs, lower health care costs, and provide a source of economic activity throughout the state.

Jobless Florida citizens are waiting. Patients are waiting. The Florida economy is waiting. Don't make them wait any longer.

You can turn around the lives of patients and the Florida economy, and we request that you do.

Click Here To Sign Cathy's Petition

Tell Congress To Undo The NDAA, Ban Indefinite Military Detention Of Americans

2012-01-04T00:26:00.001-05:00

Call To Action From Demand Progress:

President Obama just signed the National Defense Authorization Act into law despite startling provisions that will allow the military to indefinitely detain American citizens. It's a travesty, defying basic principles of justice and due process in perhaps the most extreme respect our nation has ever seen.

Thankfully, several lawmakers are keeping up the fight. Senator Dianne Feinstein has introduced legislation to undo these provisions of the NDAA, in the form of the Due Process Guarantee Act. We need to urge other Senators to support it.

The Due Process Guarantee Act of 2011 amends the Non-Detention Act of 1971 by providing that a Congressional authorization for the use of military force does not authorize the indefinite detention—without charge or trial—of U.S. citizens who are apprehended domestically.

If there's enough of a public outcry, we have a real chance of making this happen: More than 40 senators voted against the indefinite detention provisions of the NDAA -- and that was before the media and general public caught on to what was happening. Please urge your Senators to remedy this terrible wrong.

Click Here To Sign The Petition

Lawrence Lessig on Money, Corruption and Politics

2012-01-02T20:22:00.000-05:00

I was glad to hear a true voice of reason, Lawrence Lessig on NPR tonight to discuss corruption in Washington.

Click here to listen to the show.

Here's some highlights from the show, On Point with Tom Ashbrook:

“We’ve got to work on getting a representative democracy working,” said legal scholar turned political activist Lawrence Lessig. “We can do that by destroying this corrupting influence of money in our system.”

Lessig says that our political system is so corrupted by money that it hurts both causes on the left and the right. On the left, for instance, the failure to pass global warming legislation or universal healthcare, in the face of institutional inertia. While on the right, he says, issues like simplifying the tax code have fallen victim to the same forces resisting reform. “Our current tax system with all its complexities is in part designed to make it easier for candidates, in particular congressmen, to raise money to get back to congress,” Lessig said. “All sorts of special exceptions which expire after a limited period of time are just a reason to pick up the phone and call somebody and say ‘Your exception is about to expire, here’s a good reason for you to help us fight to get it to extend.’ And that gives them the opportunity to practice what is really a type of extortion – shaking the trees of money in the private sector into their campaign coffers so that they can run for congress again.”

Those giveaways, tax breaks, and subsidies all corrupt and distort the free market, which should anger both sides of the political spectrum, he said. “Businesses increasingly recognize that their highest return on investment comes not from inventing the next great widget, instead spending money on lobbyists who can get special deals built into the tax code or built into the government spending programs that give them a higher return than any of the investment that they would ever make by investing in genuine innovation.”

So, how can the system be saved? A system of publicly funded campaigns for starters. But getting Washington to sign-off on such a system, Lessig said: they’ve got too much money to lose.

Click on the photo below to listen to Professor Lessig’s presentation “Republic, Lost” and learn more about the corrupting power of money in politics and what we can do about it:

Hasn't the media spent enough time on the fake GOP debates?

What about United Re:public and Get Money Out?

See: www.unitedrepublic.org

Follow: @unitedrep @peopleoverpolitics

#PUSHNATION #p2

Learn More:

Lawrence Lessig: Cntrl+Alt+Del

Republic Lost - How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It

New Year, Same Issues

2012-01-01T21:58:00.000-05:00

I'm kicking off the New Year with some insight from my favorite comedic oracle, George Carlin.

His words inspired me to make one of my New Year's resolutions encouraging people to start start acknowledging the difference between the ruling class and its host, the upper class.

Click for full size image.

For the visually impaired:

See Also:

George Carlin: Cynic or Prophet?

George Carlin and Bill Hicks Tell It Like It Is

George Carlin: The American Dream

National Lawyers Guild Condemns NDAA

2011-12-28T14:59:00.000-05:00

"NLG condemns NDAA provisions on indefinite detention"
Source: National Lawyers Guild
Date: Dec. 27, 2011

After over a decade of the so-called “War on Terror,” President Barack Obama is about to sign the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) into law. The NDAA permits the indefinite detention of anyone, including citizens of the United States, who “was part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces, under the law of war until the end of hostilities” – an extremely problematic and vague definition. In addition, it permits the transfer of any detained individuals to any foreign country and trial of such persons before a military tribunal.

The National Lawyers Guild adds its voice to the many others who oppose this legislation. Our opposition is not based solely on the fact that this bill allows indefinite detention of US citizens and residents or that the presumed “battlefield” encompasses the entire globe. We oppose indefinite detention without trial because it is immoral and cruel and because it violates the U.S. Constitution and international law.

Our principled opposition is based on the:

1. United States Constitution’s Article 1, Section 9, Clause 2 which enshrines the privilege to petition for habeas corpus;

2. United States Constitution’s Article 3, Section 3 which provides those charged with treason heightened due process protections;

3. United States Constitution’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure;

4. United States Constitution’s Fifth Amendment prohibition of deprivations of liberty without due process;

5. United States Constitution’s Sixth Amendment right to a speedy and public trial, to knowledge of the charges, to the assistance of counsel and to confront witnesses;

6. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which the United States has signed, and which holds that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile” (Article 9); those who are arrested are entitled to a fair and public hearing by an impartial tribunal (Article 10), and all those charged with a penal offence are presumed innocent, and have the right to a public trial and all of the guarantees necessary for a defense (Article 11); and

7. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the United States has ratified, and which provides in article 9 (1): “Everyone has the right to liberty and security of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention. No one shall be deprived of his liberty except on such grounds and in accordance with such procedure as are established by law.”

The laws of war do not override these rights. International humanitarian law, set forth in the Geneva Conventions, applies to all battlefield hostilities, including illegal wars. The current “war on terror” is an undeclared war without end, waged everywhere on Earth. Indefinite detention for the duration of such a “war” is an immoral act of extreme injustice that makes a mockery of the idea that prisoners of war may be held only until the end of hostilities.

The National Lawyers Guild opposed expansion of executive power by George W. Bush, who oversaw Guantánamo and other “black sites” where prisoners often endured cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture at the hands of their captors without access to lawyers or courts to challenge either the fact or the conditions of their confinement. We oppose equally the current president’s claim to such executive power and his apparent desire to expand it.

The absolute power that the NDAA affords the Executive Branch and the military is dangerous, allowing the Executive Branch to designate whomever it chooses to be subjected to its draconian provisions.

If President Obama were committed to Constitution and international legal norms, he would veto this bill. Instead, he seems more concerned about consolidating the power of the Executive Branch at the cost of our legal and human rights. As “terrorism” and “radical Islam” have come to replace “Communism” in the federal government’s lexicon of fear, the United States continues its spiral toward a new era of McCarthyism. The NDAA is one more step down that road.

CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW YOUR REPRESENTATIVES VOTED

See Also:

Ask Obama To Veto Indefinite Military Detention of AMERICAN CITIZENS

The Fake War On Terrorism Continues

Floridians Demand Your Right to Recall

2011-12-28T14:45:00.000-05:00

By: Roger N. Thomas
Source: SignOn

Governor Rick Scott's voter satisfaction rating is lower than virtually any other governor, and the GOP legislature simply supports or even expands on his disastrous policies.

But unlike in 18 other states, the citizens of Florida have no legal method to recall Gov. Scott or state legislators. As a result, we're stuck with results of their disastrous decisions.

That's why I created a petition to the Florida State House and Senate and Gov. Scott on SignOn.org, which says:

Whereas the voters of Florida have politicians that routinely pass legislation and take executive privilege beyond the voters' expressed desires, we demand the right to recall politicians (both legislative and executive) who fail to meet the electorate's mandates. We further demand that both the Florida constitution and city charters be amended to include the right of recall, and such right shall not be more stringently restricted than it is in other states that currently recognize the right in their respective bodies of law.

Click here to sign the petition and pass it along.

The Drug War Industrial Complex

2011-12-28T14:21:00.000-05:00

Noam Chomsky interviewed by John Veit

High Times, April 1998

Source: The Chomsky Website

Q: You've defined the War on Drugs as an instrument of population control. How does it accomplish that?

CHOMSKY: Population control is actually a term I borrowed from the counterinsurgency literature of the Kennedy years. The main targets at the time were Southeast Asia and Latin America, where there was an awful lot of popular ferment. They recognized that the population was supporting popular forces that were calling for all kinds of social change that the United States simply could not tolerate. And you could control people in a number of ways. One way was just by terror and violence, napalm bombing and so on, but they also worked on developing other kinds of population-control measures to keep people subjugated, ranging from propaganda to concentration camps. Propaganda is much more effective when it is combined with terror.

You have the same problem domestically, where the public is constantly getting out of control. You have to carry out measures to insure that they remain passive and apathetic and obedient, and don't interfere with privilege or power. It's a major theme of modern democracy. As the mechanisms of democracy expand, like enfranchisement and growth, the need to control people by other means increases.

So the growth of corporate propaganda in the United States more or less parallels the growth of democracy, for quite straightforward reasons. It's not any kind of secret. It is discussed very frankly and openly in business literature and academic social-science journals. You have to "fight the everlasting battle for the minds of men," in their standard phraseology, to indoctrinate and regiment them in the way that armies regiment their bodies. Those are population control measures. This engineering or manufacture of consent is the essence of democracy, because you have to insure that ignorant and meddlesome outsiders -- meaning we, the people -- don't interfere with the work of the serious people who run public affairs in the interests of the privileged.

Q: How does the War on Drugs fit into this?

CHOMSKY: Well, one of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people in every society, whether it's a military dictatorship or a democracy, is to frighten them. If people are frightened, they'll be willing cede authority to their superiors who will protect them: "OK, I'll let you run my life in order to protect me," that sort of reasoning.
So the fear of drugs and the fear of crime is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda. The National Justice Commission repeatedly points out that crime in the United States, while sort of high, is not off the spectrum for industrialized societies. On the other hand, fear of crime is far beyond other societies, and mostly stimulated by various propaganda. The Drug War is an effort to stimulate fear of dangerous people from who we have to protect ourselves. It is also, a direct form of control of what are called "dangerous classes," those superfluous people who don't really have a function contributing to profit-making and wealth. They have to be somehow taken care of.

Q: In some other countries you just hang the rabble.

CHOMSKY: Yes, but in the U.S. you don't kill them, you put them in jail. The economic policies of the 1980's sharply increased inequality, concentrating such economic growth as there was, which was not enormous, in very few hands. The top few percent of the population got extremely wealthy as profits went through the roof, and meanwhile median-income wages were stagnating or declining sharply since the '70's. You're getting a large mass of people who are insecure, suffering from difficulty to misery, or something in between. A lot of them are basically going to be arrested, because you have to control them.

Q: It's absolutely true, but how do you prove it?

CHOMSKY: Just by looking at the trend lines for marijuana. Marijuana use was peaking in the late '70's, but there was not much criminalization. You didn't go to jail for having marijuana then because the people using it were nice folks like us, the children of the rich. You don't throw them into jail any more than you throw corporate executives into jail -- even though corporate crime is more costly and dangerous than street crime. But then in the '80's the use of various "unhealthy" substances started to decline among more educated sectors: marijuana and tobacco smoking, alcohol, red meat, coffee, this whole category of stuff. On the other hand, usage remained steady among poorer sectors of the population. In the United States, poor and black correlation -- they're not identical, but there's a correlation -- and in poor, black and hispanic sectors of the population the use of such substances remained steady.

So take a look at those trends. When you call for a War on Drugs, you know exactly who you're going to pick up: poor black people. You're not going to pick up rich white people: you don't go after them anyway. In the upper-middle class suburb where I live, if somebody goes home and sniffs cocaine, police don't break into their house.

So there are many factors making the Drug War a war against the poor, largely poor people of color. And those are the people they have to get rid of. During the period these economic policies were being instituted, the incarceration rate was shooting up, but crime wasn't, it was steady or declining. But imprisonment went way up. By the late '80's, in terms of imprisoning our population, we were way ahead of the rest of the world, way ahead of any other industrial society.

Q: Who benefits from incarcerating young black males?

CHOMSKY: A lot of people. Poor people are basically superfluous for wealth production, and therefore the wealthy want to get rid of them. The rich also frighten everyone else, because if you're afraid of these people, then you submit to state authority. But beyond that, it's a state industry. Since the 1930's, every businessman has understood that a private capitalist economy must have massive state subsidies; the only question is what form that state subsidy will take? In the United States the main form has been through the military system. The most dynamic aspects of the economy -- computers, the Internet, the aeronautical industry, pharmaceuticals -- have fed off the military system. But the crime-control industry, as it's called by criminologists, is becoming the fastest-growing industry in America.

And it's state industry, publicly funded. It's the construction industry, the real estate industry, and also high tech firms. It's gotten to a sufficient scale that high-technology and military contractors are looking to it as a market for techniques of high-tech control and surveillance, so you can monitor what people do in their private activities with complicated electronic devices and supercomputers: monitoring their telephone calls and urinalyses and so forth. In fact, the time will probably come when this superfluous population can be locked up in private apartments, not jails, and just monitored to track when they do something wrong, say the wrong thing, go the wrong direction.

Q: House arrest for the masses.

CHOMSKY: It's enough of an industry so that the major defense-industry firms are interested; you can read about it in The Wall Street Journal. The big law firms and investment houses are interested: Merrill Lynch is floating big loans for prison construction. If you take the whole system, it's probably approaching the scale of the Pentagon.

Also, this is a terrific work force. We hear fuss about prison labor in China, but prison labor is standard here. It's very cheap, it doesn't organize, the workers don't ask for rights, you don't have to worry about health benefits because the public is paying for everything. It's what's called a 'flexible' workforce, the kind of thing economists like: you have the workers when you want them, and you throw them out when you don't want them.

And what's more it's an old American tradition. There was a big industrial revolution in parts of the South in the early part of this century, in northern Georgia and Kentucky and Alabama and it was based mostly around prison labor. The slaves had been technically freed, but after a few years, they were basically slaves again. One way of controlling them was to throw them in jail, where they became a controlled labor force. That's the core of the modern industrial revolution in the South, which continued in Georgia to the 1920's and to the Second World War in places like Mississippi.
Now it's being revived. In Oregon and California there's a fairly substantial textile industry in the prisons, with exports to Asia. At the very time people were complaining about prison labor in China, California and Oregon are exporting prison-made textiles to China. They even have a line called "Prison Blues."

And it goes all the way up to advanced technology like data processing. In the state of Washington, Boeing workers are protesting the exports of jobs to China, but they're probably unaware that their jobs are being exported to nearby prisons, where machinists are doing work for Boeing under circumstances that the management is delighted over, for obvious reasons.

Q: And most of these prisoners are nonviolent drug offenders.

CHOMSKY: The enormous rate of growth of the prison population has been mostly drug related. The last figures I saw showed that over half the federal prison population, and maybe a quarter in state prisons, are drug offenders. In New York State, for example, a twenty-dollar street sale or possession of an ounce of cocaine will get you the same sentence as arson with intent to murder. The three-strikes legislation is going to blow it right through the sky. The third arrest can be for some minor drug offense, and you'll go to jail forever.

Q: The Drug Czar's office estimates that Americans spend $57 billion annually on illegal drugs. What effect does this have on the global economy?

CHOMSKY: Well, the United Nations tries to monitor the international drug trade, and their estimates are on the order of $400 to $500 billion -- half a trillion dollars a year -- in trade alone, which makes it higher than oil, something like 10 percent of the world trade. Where this money comes and goes to is mostly unknown, but general estimates are that maybe 60 percent of it passes through US banks. After that, a lot goes to offshore tax havens. It's so obscure that nobody monitors it, and nobody wants to. But the Commerce Department every year publishes figures on foreign direct investment -- where US investment is going -- and through the '90s the big excitement has been the "new emerging markets" like Latin America. And it turns out that a quarter of US foreign direct investment is going to Bermuda, another 15 percent to the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, another 10 percent to Panama, and so on. Now, they're not building steel factories. The most benign interpretation is that it's just tax havens. And the less benign interpretation is that it's one way of passing illegal money into places where it will not be monitored. We really don't know, because it is not investigated. This is not the task of the Justice Department, which is to go after a black kid in the ghetto who has a joint in his pocket.

Q: What do you think of the US policy of offering trade and aid favors to countries who promulgate so-called antidrug initiatives?

CHOMSKY: Actually, US programs radically increase the use of drugs. Look at the big growth in cocaine production that has exploded in the Andes over the last few years, in Columbia and Peru and Bolivia. Why are Bolivian peasants, for instance producing coca? The neoliberal structural-adjustment policies of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which are run by the US, try to drive peasants into agro-export, producing not for local consumption but for sale abroad. They want to reduce social programs, like spending for health and education, cutting government deficits by increasing exports. And they cut back tariffs so that we can pour our highly subsidized food exports into their countries, which of course undercuts peasant production. Put all that together and what do you get? You get a huge increase in Bolivian coca production, as their only comparative advantage.

The same is true in Columbia, where US "food for peace" aid, as it is called, was used to destroy wheat production by essentially giving food -- at what amounts to US taxpayer expense -- through US agro-exporters to undercut wheat production there, which later cut coffee production and their ability to set prices in any reasonably fashion.
And the end result is they turn to something else, and one of the things they turn to is coca production. In fact, if you look at the total effect of US policies, it has been to increase drugs.

Q: Well, anybody who looks into the history of American drug policies in this century...

CHOMSKY: I'm putting aside another factor altogether, namely clandestine warfare. If you look into the history of what is called the CIA, which means the US White House, it's secret wars, clandestine warfare, the trail of drug production just follows. It started in France after the Second World War when the United States was essentially trying to reinstate the traditional social order, to rehabilitate Fascist collaborators, wipe out the Resistance and destroy the unions and so on. The first thing they did was reconstitute the Mafia, as strikebreakers or for other such useful services. And the mafia doesn't do it for fun, so there was tradeoff: Essentially they allowed them to reinstitute the heroin-production system, which had been destroyed by the Fascists. The Fascists tended to run a pretty tight ship; they didn't want any competition, so they wiped out the Mafia. But the US reconstituted it, first in southern Italy, and then in southern France with the Corsican Mafia. That's where the famous French Connection comes from.

That was the main heroin center for many years. Then the US terrorist activities shifted over to Southeast Asia. If you want to carry out terrorist activities, you need local people to do it for you, and you also need secret money to pay for it, clandestine hidden money. Well if you need to hire thugs and murderers with secret money, there aren't many options. One of them is the drug connection. The so-called Golden Triangle around Burma, Laos and Thailand became a big drug-producing area with the help of the United States, as part of the secret wars against those populations.

In Central America, it was partly exposed in the Contra hearings, though it was mostly suppressed. But there's no question that the Reagan administration's terrorist operations in Central America were closely connected with drug trafficking.

Afghanistan became one of the biggest centers of drug trafficking in the world in the 1980s, because that was the payoff for the forces to which the US was contributing millions of dollars: the same extreme Islamic fundamentalists who are now tearing the country to shreds.

It's been true throughout the world. It's not that the US is trying to increase the use of drugs, it's just the natural thing to do. If you were in a position where you had to hire thugs and gangsters to kill peasants and break strikes, and you had to do it with untraceable money, what would come to your mind?

Q: Where do you stand on drug legalization?

CHOMSKY: Nobody knows what the effect would be. Anyone who tells you they know is just stupid or lying, because nobody knows. These are things that have to be tried, you have to experiment to see what the effects are.

Most soft drugs are already legal, mainly alcohol and tobacco. Tobacco is by far the biggest killer among all the psychoactives. Alcohol deaths are a little hard to estimate, because an awful lot of violent deaths are associated with alcohol. Way down below come "hard" drugs, a tiny fraction of the deaths from alcohol and tobacco, maybe ten or twenty thousand deaths per year. The fastest growing hard drugs are APS, amphetamine-type substances, produced mostly in the US.

As far as the rest of the drugs are concerned, marijuana is not known to be very harmful. I mean, it's generally assumed it's not good for you, but coffee isn't good for you, tea isn't good for you, chocolate cake isn't good for you either. It would be crazy to criminalize coffee, even though it's harmful.

The United States is one of very few countries where this is considered a moral issue. In most countries it's considered a medical issue. In most countries you don't have politicians getting up screaming about how tough they're going to be on drugs. So the first thing we've got to do is move out of the phase of population control, and into the sphere of social issues. The Rand Corporation estimates that if you compare the effect of criminal programs versus educational programs at reducing drug use, educational programs are way ahead by about a factor of seven.

Q: But alarmist drug-propaganda programs like DARE and the Partnership for a Drug-Free America's TV ads have been found to increase experimentation among teenagers.

CHOMSKY: The question is, what kind of education are you doing? Educational programs aren't the only category. Education also has to do with the social circumstances in which drugs are used. The answer to that is not throwing people in jail. The answer is to try and figure what's going on in their lives, their family, do they need medical care and so on? This very striking decline in substance abuse among educated sectors, as I said, goes across the spectrum -- red meat, coffee, tobacco, everything. That's education. It wasn't that there was an educational program that said to stop drinking coffee, it's just that attitudes toward oneself and towards health, how we live and so on, changed among the more educated sectors of the population, and these things went down. And none of it had to do with criminalization. It just had to do with a rise in the cultural and educational level, which led to more care for oneself.

More Noam Chomsky Interviews

#STOPSOPA

2011-12-24T20:38:00.004-05:00

It's not over.

#STOPSOPA

The Road To Fascism

2011-12-20T13:24:00.009-05:00

“You can come down here with free speech, but when you start saying we would have killed Jesus or put baby Jesus out in the cold or comparing us to Hitler and Himmler, all of that is just inappropriate.” - Sam Hall, Pensacola City Council President

"I think it's funny that so many people proudly worship a homeless man on Sunday and then you want to arrest him on Monday." - Father Nathan Monk

The following clip shows highlights from the December 12, 2011 Pensacola City Council meeting where citizens voiced their grievances with ordinances that would outlaw camping on public property --- meaning the homeless and #occupy protestors.

Watch as Council President Sam Hall interrupted several speakers he deemed "out of order" or "off topic" --- and even has some speakers removed from the meeting:

This preceded the December 15th meeting where Father Nathan Monk was silenced and asked to be removed after he criticized the City Council for violating several speakers constitutional rights. Watch:

Read More:

Pensacola Digest: Council Urges Civility, Threatens Priest With Police Removal

Pensacola Residents Speak Out Against Ordinances Targeting Homelessness and Occupy Movement [VIDEO]

The Fake War on Terror Continues...

2011-12-14T22:15:00.009-05:00

This one goes out to President Obama who, as word on the street has it, isn't going to veto Indefinite Military Detention of US Citizens suspected of "terrorism."

So, We must ask ourselves, What is the dictionary definition of “Terrorism”?
The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion
But what is terror?

According to the dictionary I hold in my hand, Terror, is violent or destructive acts
Such as bombing committed by groups in order to intimidate a population,
Or government into granting their demands

So whats a terrorist?

They’re calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
When they put it on me, I tell them this
I’m all about peace and love
They calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
Insulting my intelligence
Oh how these people judge..

It seems like the Rag-heads and Paki’s are worrying your Dad
But your dad’s favorite food is curry and kebab
It’s funny, but it’s sad how they make your mummy hurry with her bags
Rather read The Sun than study all the facts
Tell me, what’s the bigger threat to human society
BAE Systems or home made IED’s
Remote controlled drones, killing off human lives
Or man with home made bomb committing suicide
I know you were terrified when you saw the towers fall
It’s all terror but some forms are more powerful
It seems nuts, how could there be such agony
When more Israeli’s die from peanut allergies
It’s like the definition didn’t ever exist
I guess it’s all just depending who your nemesis is
Irrelevant how eloquent the rhetoric peddler is
They’re telling fibs, now tell us who the real terrorist is

They’re calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
When they put it on me, I tell them this
I’m all about peace and love
They calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
Insulting my intelligence
Oh how these people judge..

Lumumba was democracy – Mossadegh was democracy
Allende was democracy – Hypocrisy it bothers me
Call you terrorists if you don’t wanna be a colony
We used to bow down to a policy of robbery
Is terrorism my lyrics?
When more Vietnam vets kill themselves after the war than died in it?
This is very basic..
One nation in the world has over a thousand military bases
They say it’s religion, when clearly it isn’t
It’s not just Muslims that oppose your imperialism
Is Hugo Chavez a Muslim? Nah.. I didn’t think so
Is Castro a Muslim? Nah.. I didn’t think so
It’s like the definition didn’t ever exist
I guess it’s all just depending who your nemesis is
Irrelevant how eloquent the rhetoric peddler is
They’re telling fibs, now tell us who the terrorist is

They’re calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
When they put it on me, I tell them this
I’m all about peace and love
They calling me a terrorist
Like they don’t know who the terror is
Insulting my intelligence
Oh how these people judge..

You think that I don’t know,
But I know, I know, I know
You think that we don’t know
But we know

You think that I don’t know,
But I know, I know, I know
You think that we don’t know
But we DO

Was Building 7 terrorism?
Was nanothermite terrorism?
Diego Garcia was terrorism,
I am conscious the Contras was terrorism,
Phosphorous that burns hands – that is terrorism,
Irgun and Stern Gang that was terrorism,
What they did in Hiroshima was terrorism,
What they did in Fallujah was terrorism,
Mandela ANC – that was terrorism,
Jerry Adams IRA – that was terrorism,
Eric Prince black water – it was terrorism,
Oklahoma, McVeigh – that was terrorism,
Everyday USA – that is terrorism,
Everyday UK – that is terrorism,
Everyday…

- Low Key, "Terrorist?"

Lyrics courtesy of EvaShaki

See Related:

The "War" on Terrorism: Prevention or Damage Control?

Lowkey - Obama Nation

Lowkey - Obama Nation Part 2

Amazon: Lowkey - Soundtrack to the Struggle

It's Do Or Die Time

2011-12-14T12:09:00.003-05:00

Learn more about SOPA and PIPA

Don't Let Them Censor the Internet!

2011-12-13T10:32:00.004-05:00

This Thursday the House Judiciary Committee will vote on a bill that would give a few corporations unprecedented power to blacklist websites.

Rep. Ted Deutch could cast the deciding vote on Thursday.

Call Rep. Deutch and tell him to stand with us against the Internet censorship bill!

His number is (202) 225-3001.

If Deutch votes for the “Stop Online Piracy Act,” or SOPA (H.R. 3261), and it passes through committee, this censorship bill will be one dangerous step closer to law.

Another bill in the Senate — the "Protect IP Act," or PIPA (S. 968) — is intended to address online copyright infringement (just like SOPA, its cousin in the House). But PIPA is so broad it would give corporations the power to shut down websites at will. It would essentially burn down the store to catch a thief.

Join more than a dozen organizations in a national call-in day against online censorship to stop PIPA before it comes up for a vote!

Pick up the phone and urge your representatives to stand up against online censorship, and against PIPA!

Click here to find out your representative's contact information

Spread the word:

KEEP OUR INTERNET FREE FROM CORPORATE CENSORSHIP!

Full Text of the Protect IP Act of 2011:

Dylan Ratigan Tells It Like It Is

2011-12-06T00:31:00.006-05:00

"Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America. Democrats aren’t doing it, Republicans are not doing it, an entire integrated system, financial system, trading system, taxing system, that was created by both parties over a period of two decades is at work on our entire country right now... We’re sitting here arguing about whether we should do the $4 trillion plan that kicks the can down the road for the president for 2017, or burn the place to the ground, both of which are reckless, irresponsible and stupid."

Speaking of Obama:

"I would like him to go to the people of the United States of America and say, 'People of the United States of America, your Congress is bought, your Congress is incapable of making legislation on healthcare, banking, trade, or taxes because if they do it, they will lose their political funding and they won’t do it. But I’m the President of the United States, and I won’t have a country that is run by a bought Congress. So I’m not going to work with a bought Congress and try to be Mr. Big Guy ... I’m going to abandon the bought Congress like Teddy Roosevelt did, and I’m going to go to the people of the United States get rid of the bought Congress.' ... Until a President says that’s the problem and says he’s going to fix it, there is no policy that I can possibly see no matter how brilliant your idea may be or your idea or my idea or her idea or your idea at home, is that idea will not happen as long as there’s a capacity to basically fire a politician who disagrees with me by taking funding away from him. Is that a fair assessment?"

Watch:

WHEN IS ENOUGH ENOUGH?

IT'S TIME TO GET MONEY OUT OF POLITICS.

JOIN THE FIGHT:

United Re:public

See also:

Dylan Ratigan on War on Terror

Both Parties Should Be Scared of the Occupy Movement

2011-12-02T20:04:00.005-05:00

By: Kevin Zeese
Source: Occupy Wall Street News
OccupyWashingtonDC

Frank Luntz, a top Republican pollster, told a meeting of Republican Governors that he is “scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death.” Why? Because the Occupy Movement is effecting the political dialogue and what they think of “capitalism.” Rather than suggesting Republicans change their ways, he suggests changing their rhetoric to fool Americans — it won’t work.

But, Democrats should also be concerned, at the UC Davis Occupation the General Assembly passed a resolution (see below) that said the way forward is clear: “No support should be given to either of the two parties!” They detail how Democratic mayors in a concerted attack with the Obama administration have been closing and attacking occupations. And, how politicians from both parties are “dismantling public education, cutting social services, and undermining all our basic social and democratic rights.”

Why should both parties be afraid? Because the truth is coming out. And, the truth is that both parties are sold out to monied interests, have created a corrupt economy and political system; and have ignored the people’s views for too long.

President Obama, is also failing to change his ways. He continues to hold fundraisers around the country costing $38,500 to attend, greater than the median income of Americans. Occupiers are protesting these fundraisers. Obama is raising more money from Wall Street than any politician in American history through his campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Does he think the occupiers do not see he is in bed with Wall Street?

And, it is not only the political parties that are in question. Non-profits and unions that have been traditional allies of the Democratic Party need to rethink their allegiance. I wrote about Van Jones and his Rebuild the Dream as well as MoveOn and their connections to the Democratic Party and got very positive responses from occupiers. The Occupy Movement will not be co-opted by Democratic Party operatives.

Unions are also coming under criticism, despite their support of Occupy’s. Our hope is that these groups will realize the times have changed and politics needs to be reconsidered. The truth is the Occupy Movement can be the savior of working people, but the unions need to decide which side they are on – the Democrats or the people — they cannot be on both. This is the time for unions to declare their political independence.

The Occupy Movement is an opportunity to root out deep corruption in the economy and political system. Those who have been part of this corruption should use it to break free and start anew. Tell the truth about what you have seen and why you are siding with the Occupiers. This is a great political moment if all Americans come together on the side of a new beginning and ending the corrupt practices of the past. We can create the world we want to see.

Two Lesbians Raised A Baby And This Is What They Got

2011-12-01T14:11:00.002-05:00

From MoveOn.org

What’s the reason for opposing this again?

Watch:

Ask Obama To Veto Indefinite Military Detention of AMERICAN CITIZENS

2011-11-30T23:02:00.006-05:00

Remix of an urgent message from Demand Progress

An unimaginable violation of due process: The Senate just voted to allow the military to detain American citizens indefinitely -- without even charging them with a crime -- if they are said to be suspected of terrorism.

As Senator Dianne Feinstein put it, "Congress is essentially authorizing the indefinite imprisonment of American citizens, without charge," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein."

Thankfully, President Obama has threatened to veto the bill, noting that:

Applying this military custody requirement to individuals inside the United States, as some Members of Congress have suggested is their intention, would raise serious and unsettled legal questions and would be inconsistent with the fundamental American principle that our military does not patrol our streets.

Obama only has a few days to make up his mind: Will you sign the Demand Progress petition to urge him to make good on his veto threat?

PETITION TO PRESIDENT OBAMA: We urge you to stand by your threat to veto the new National Defense Authorization Act as passed by Congress. Allowing indefinite military detention of American citizens -- without even being charged -- is an unfathomable violation of due process.

Learn More:

HP: Senate Votes To Let Military Detain Americans Indefinitely, White House Threatens Veto

Spread the Word...

#POP Presents: Rally @ The Miami Federal Reserve!

2011-11-22T00:00:00.016-05:00

Protestors gather outside the Federal Reserve in Miami, Florida on November 22, 2011:

Flickr: Occupy the Fed Miami

Follow People Over Politics on Twitter for updates.

A Rich Man's World

2011-11-21T18:12:00.011-05:00

PARENTAL ADVISORY: THIS MAY BE TO REAL FOR YOU OR THE KIDS

Immortal Technique - A Rich Man's World:

The Greatest Speech Never Given:

"Ultimas Palabras"

A new American revolution has begun,

Not against the forces of a colonial kingdom

But a rebellion against an oppressor that has risen among us,

It is not a foreign invasion we have to fear,

Rather the threat of a force within our nation

That has usurped what was once a dream of having the greatest democracy ever known to man,

We now live in a world where the population has grown exponentially,

And the planet is running out of resources to sustain us all,

We in the inner-city and those struggling in the suburban ghettos may not realize it yet,

But make no mistake,

The people who control the technology and run every enterprise that makes up our world,

Have seen this coming for a long time,

The ideas of renewable energy,

Global warming,

The idea of collectively working,

Were purposefully bought out, derailed, demonized, or corrupted,

In favor of an economic structure designed by a monetary caste system,

In a desperate attempt to convince us that we need to maintain that extravagant existence,

They’ve pretended we might share in their dream,

That we can justify any inhumanity in its name,

Out of this blind ignorance was born the curse of slavery,

Many of the founders of this nation were themselves Masons,

That is not a Left wing or Right wing conspiracy theory,

It is a widely known and accepted fact,

So then explain to me how a nation founded by men,

Who not only understood the long and complicated history of Europe,

But also that of Africa,

Could permeate such a lie in convincing the American public,

That one race of men was superior and one inferior,

When in fact we know that all the early men,

The men who created civilization and every aspect of what we see today,

The foundation of all human life,

Were from Africa,

The greatest cowardice of course came not with slavery itself,

Unfortunately,

But with the excuses for slavery,

For if America had been as brave as the Roman Empire and all other empires that have come after her,

And claimed “No, we were just stronger and that’s why we took you”,

Then when slavery was over racism would’ve probably followed in suit,

But instead it was the social lie,

The religious lie that was told,

That stayed in the mind of people,

That seperated one human being from another,

In order to distract us from the issues of class and freedom,

They created issues around religion and race to dominate the world for centuries to come,

Some claim that they respect the culture of life in this country,

They cry out for indignity of children that are slaughtered before they are born,

But God has not penetrated their souls,

For they have no empathy,

Nothing in their cold hearts for the 100s of 1,000s of lives we have taken in our wars overseas,

For that which they call “collateral damage”,

Which the are the burnt and damaged children of the world,

They have no prayers for them,

Only snide commentary on the internet and laughter in their hearts,

And yet you claim to be one with God,

Huh,

We talk about immigration in this country,

Might doesn’t make right ladies and gentleman,

It just makes right now,

What we are saying to the rest of the world,

Is one day when America grows weak,

One day when her legions falter,

On the day when her economy crumbles,

China, Russia, Europe, whatever power has arisen,

All you have to do is come here and conquer us in a few military excursions,

And then you too can set up shop here,

And in 100 years you can tell every red-blooded American,

“No, you are an illegal human being,

I am the true citizen,

I have all the rights,

You have no rights",

Maybe you forgot how you got this country,

Maybe you take for granted the blood, the sweat, the tears,

That the people who live in practical serfdom shed everyday,

For we may not run America, but we make America run,

We talk about the Law,

Yet,

How many indignities have been legal in the past?

How many treaties with Native Americans have we broken?

How many international laws have we violated?

And,

Speaking of laws ,

How can a corporation be regulated by a government that is funded and controlled by corporations?

How can there be accountability,

For people who see a profit margin above the lives of Americans?

Above the lives of human beings in other countries?

We have taken the soul out ourselves and placed them inside machines,

My words of course,

Will be marginalized, demonized,

In typical fashion,

Anytime you dare to question the power structure they say you hate America,

No, I love this country,

I see its beauty everyday in its people,

And I love it a lot more than those who have abandoned the American worker,

That have chose to exploit and try to take away benefit she has,

Those that attempt to make excuses for every atrocity committed,

In the name of supposed freedom,

Those who demand accountability from everyone,

But offer none themselves,

Who favor contracts over lives,

Who favor invasion and control over organic democracy overseas,

The greatest flaw that any intelligent person has is to think they’re smarter than everyone else,

And so the government has planted its spies amongst us,

We have planted our spies among them,

They have infiltrated every branch of the American government,

They have retrieved names, data, hard numbers,

The paper trail that will expose those that truly control this country,

Those that control the political parties,

Those that control the oil industry,

The energy,

Those that stand behind the companies faceless,

Whose names have never been revealed,

Until tod.. (GUNSHOT)

Lyrics Courtesy of Brent @ RapGenius

More From The Martyr

Download the FREE album here.

This Is What Revolution Looks Like

2011-11-20T17:35:00.004-05:00

By: Chris Hedges
Source: truthdig

Welcome to the revolution. Our elites have exposed their hand. They have nothing to offer. They can destroy but they cannot build. They can repress but they cannot lead. They can steal but they cannot share. They can talk but they cannot speak. They are as dead and useless to us as the water-soaked books, tents, sleeping bags, suitcases, food boxes and clothes that were tossed by sanitation workers Tuesday morning into garbage trucks in New York City. They have no ideas, no plans and no vision for the future.

Our decaying corporate regime has strutted in Portland, Oakland and New York with their baton-wielding cops into a fool’s paradise. They think they can clean up “the mess”—always employing the language of personal hygiene and public security—by making us disappear. They think we will all go home and accept their corporate nation, a nation where crime and government policy have become indistinguishable, where nothing in America, including the ordinary citizen, is deemed by those in power worth protecting or preserving, where corporate oligarchs awash in hundreds of millions of dollars are permitted to loot and pillage the last shreds of collective wealth, human capital and natural resources, a nation where the poor do not eat and workers do not work, a nation where the sick die and children go hungry, a nation where the consent of the governed and the voice of the people is a cruel joke.

Get back into your cages, they are telling us. Return to watching the lies, absurdities, trivia and celebrity gossip we feed you in 24-hour cycles on television. Invest your emotional energy in the vast system of popular entertainment. Run up your credit card debt. Pay your loans. Be thankful for the scraps we toss. Chant back to us our phrases about democracy, greatness and freedom. Vote in our rigged political theater. Send your young men and women to fight and die in useless, unwinnable wars that provide corporations with huge profits. Stand by mutely as our bipartisan congressional supercommittee, either through consensus or cynical dysfunction, plunges you into a society without basic social services including unemployment benefits. Pay for the crimes of Wall Street.

The rogues’ gallery of Wall Street crooks, such as Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs, Howard Milstein at New York Private Bank & Trust, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the Koch brothers and Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase & Co., no doubt think it’s over. They think it is back to the business of harvesting what is left of America to swell their personal and corporate fortunes. But they no longer have any concept of what is happening around them. They are as mystified and clueless about these uprisings as the courtiers at Versailles or in the Forbidden City who never understood until the very end that their world was collapsing. The billionaire mayor of New York, enriched by a deregulated Wall Street, is unable to grasp why people would spend two months sleeping in an open park and marching on banks. He says he understands that the Occupy protests are “cathartic” and “entertaining,” as if demonstrating against the pain of being homeless and unemployed is a form of therapy or diversion, but that it is time to let the adults handle the affairs of state. Democratic and Republican mayors, along with their parties, have sold us out. But for them this is the beginning of the end.

The historian Crane Brinton in his book “Anatomy of a Revolution” laid out the common route to revolution. The preconditions for successful revolution, Brinton argued, are discontent that affects nearly all social classes, widespread feelings of entrapment and despair, unfulfilled expectations, a unified solidarity in opposition to a tiny power elite, a refusal by scholars and thinkers to continue to defend the actions of the ruling class, an inability of government to respond to the basic needs of citizens, a steady loss of will within the power elite itself and defections from the inner circle, a crippling isolation that leaves the power elite without any allies or outside support and, finally, a financial crisis. Our corporate elite, as far as Brinton was concerned, has amply fulfilled these preconditions. But it is Brinton’s next observation that is most worth remembering. Revolutions always begin, he wrote, by making impossible demands that if the government met would mean the end of the old configurations of power. The second stage, the one we have entered now, is the unsuccessful attempt by the power elite to quell the unrest and discontent through physical acts of repression.

I have seen my share of revolts, insurgencies and revolutions, from the guerrilla conflicts in the 1980s in Central America to the civil wars in Algeria, the Sudan and Yemen, to the Palestinian uprising to the revolutions in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania as well as the wars in the former Yugoslavia. George Orwell wrote that all tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but that once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force. We have now entered the era of naked force. The vast million-person bureaucracy of the internal security and surveillance state will not be used to stop terrorism but to try and stop us.

Despotic regimes in the end collapse internally. Once the foot soldiers who are ordered to carry out acts of repression, such as the clearing of parks or arresting or even shooting demonstrators, no longer obey orders, the old regime swiftly crumbles. When the aging East German dictator Erich Honecker was unable to get paratroopers to fire on protesting crowds in Leipzig, the regime was finished. The same refusal to employ violence doomed the communist governments in Prague and Bucharest. I watched in December 1989 as the army general that the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu had depended on to crush protests condemned him to death on Christmas Day. Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak lost power once they could no longer count on the security forces to fire into crowds.

The process of defection among the ruling class and security forces is slow and often imperceptible. These defections are advanced through a rigid adherence to nonviolence, a refusal to respond to police provocation and a verbal respect for the blue-uniformed police, no matter how awful they can be while wading into a crowd and using batons as battering rams against human bodies. The resignations of Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s deputy, Sharon Cornu, and the mayor’s legal adviser and longtime friend, Dan Siegel, in protest over the clearing of the Oakland encampment are some of the first cracks in the edifice. “Support Occupy Oakland, not the 1% and its government facilitators,” Siegel tweeted after his resignation.

There were times when I entered the ring as a boxer and knew, as did the spectators, that I was woefully mismatched. Ringers, experienced boxers in need of a tuneup or a little practice, would go to the clubs where semi-pros fought, lie about their long professional fight records, and toy with us. Those fights became about something other than winning. They became about dignity and self-respect. You fought to say something about who you were as a human being. These bouts were punishing, physically brutal and demoralizing. You would get knocked down and stagger back up. You would reel backward from a blow that felt like a cement block. You would taste the saltiness of your blood on your lips. Your vision would blur. Your ribs, the back of your neck and your abdomen would ache. Your legs would feel like lead. But the longer you held on, the more the crowd in the club turned in your favor. No one, even you, thought you could win. But then, every once in a while, the ringer would get overconfident. He would get careless. He would become a victim of his own hubris. And you would find deep within yourself some new burst of energy, some untapped strength and, with the fury of the dispossessed, bring him down. I have not put on a pair of boxing gloves for 30 years. But I felt this twinge of euphoria again in my stomach this morning, this utter certainty that the impossible is possible, this realization that the mighty will fall.

Immortal Technique: The Martyr

2011-11-20T16:22:00.010-05:00

From Immortal Technique's new album The Martyr.

Download the FREE album here.

"The Martyr"

[Verse 1]

The point of guerilla war, is not to succeed
It’s always been just to make the enemy bleed
Deprivin’ the soldiers of the peace of mind that they need
Bullets are hard to telegraph when they bob and they weave
The only way a Guerilla War can ever be over
Is when the occupation, can’t afford more soldiers
Until they have to draft the last of you into the service
And you refuse cause you don’t see the purpose
The only way to counter the insurgents that are well-equipped
Is to paint the people fighting for freedom as terrorists
Then find a faction lookin’ for foreign investments
You stall them with power and murder any objections
You can’t stop a revolution from breathin’
So to beat ‘em they offer people the illusion of freedom
But when you’re done dreamin’ and wake up, tortured for treason
Then you can see them, hidin’ behind the God they believe in

[Verse 2]

The purpose of life is a life with a purpose
So I’d rather die for a cause than live a life that is worthless
I don’t need the circus or the day of national observance
I need you to think for you and stop being a servant
Pawns only move a square in the game that they’re used in
And realize it too late, like the shootin’ of Huey Newton
Or Patrice Lumumba and Salvador Allende
Slaughter by the power hungry branches of their own gente
Ghandi wasn’t killed by Pakistani nationals
He was assassinated by a Hindu radical
And Che Guevara, rebel to a U.S. continent
Was sold to the C.I.A. by Bolivian communists
Wasn’t Yitzhak Rabin murdered by a Zionist
And Anwar Sadat a victim of the same violence?
Malcolm X was seen as a threat to the F.B.I.
But to blast ‘em they used Muslims from the N.O.I.
Even the 35th President of the Republic
Was murdered by factions of his own government
So now that it’s proven, that a soldier of Revolution
Or head of an empire, disguised in a Constitution
Can not escape the retribution or manipulation
Of the self-appointed rulers of the planets corporations
So Imma need every generation to put your hands up
Cause you can only get ‘em off your back when you stand up!

Immortal Technique performs "Toast to the Dead" and talks about his new album

"Toast to the Dead"

[Verse 1]

Here’s a toast to the dead
If you don’t drink, smoke to the head
For the freedom fighters killed by the feds
For those who died hard in the streets soaking in red
And died slow asleep in a dream choking in bed
Here’s a toast to the dead for my enemies that are gone
I’m not a coward so, celebrating that would be wrong
I pray to God that your soul will come back again
So I can see you in the next life and finish it then
A toast to the dead for criminals, burning in hell
I wonder how many presidents are burning as well
Emperors, Popes, Senators, Generals
Amputees feelin’ unlucky until they see the vegetables
A toast to the dead for those who I’ve forgotten
Written out of the history by the corrupted and rotten
Black saints whitewashed during La Reconquista
Thousands of Indios Spaniards used to conquer the Incas
F-ck a moment of silence! I need a moment of violence!
Like the nineteenth century Caribbean Islands
Long live those who came before, that paved the way for me
The warriors and scientists that came before slavery
And if that last lyric was predictable
Take your clairvoyance and apply it to your life in the physical
Presumptuous half-hearted homunculus
Self-destruction is the power without knowing what the function is

[Verse 2]

Here’s a toast to the dead, for all of my fam
I will never let an idea die with a man
My rhymes are like Nazca lines designed to give a view-of-this
J.Dilla’s still alive as long as his music is
A toast to the dead for rap legends and pioneers
Your legacy won’t be forsaken as long as I am here
Knowledge of the past and, wisdom of the present
I’ll teach and leave in the hands of a worthy lieutenant
A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and aids
A cure exists and you probably, could have been saved
Sad to see, medicine divorce morality
Corporate homewreckers, pimpin’ up a salary
A toast to the dead, for those that’ve died today
The victims and those exonerated by DNA
The only thing worse than giving freedom to the guilty
Is killing the innocent, and leavin’ your soul filthy
Immortal Technique, remember me when I’m gone
I encrypted my lyrics to stay alive in a song
So you’ll always keep a piece, of my spirit inside
When you struggle to complete what I started before I died
But some of you, won’t survive the changes the earth makes
Swallowed by tsunamis, hurricanes and earthquakes
And that’s just the first stage of ‘you-can-not-reverse-ways’
And realize that we are one, regardless of our birthplace

Lyrics courtesy of KillerHipHop.com

Naomi Wolf on Fake Activism

2011-11-19T15:17:00.003-05:00

Naomi Wolf, author of The End of America, speaks at the Hudson Union Society on January 16, 2009 about how bureaucracy has killed effective protesting in America.

More Naomi Wolf on Fora.tv

We the People

2011-11-19T14:15:00.004-05:00

This one is dedicated to the Occupy Movement.

Remember, sharing is caring.

We the People, a set on Flickr

Watch Occupy Wall Street live:

The Other 99 Channel:

The Other 99 Channel 2:

Occupy Coral Springs High School

2011-11-18T17:02:00.001-05:00

Protestors gather outside Coral Springs High School on Thursday, November 17, 2011 to show support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Flickr: Occupy Coral Springs High School

Stay tuned for video footage.

You Cannot Evict An Idea Whose Time Has Come

2011-11-17T12:50:00.008-05:00

Today is the 2-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street.

Across the nation people are taking action in solidarity -- would you like to show solidarity too?

When New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg raided Zuccoti Park this week, Occupy Wall Street released a simple statement: "You cannot evict an idea whose time has come."

These words have been repeated many times as an eloquent statement of resilience. Today, let's help them go viral.

Click Here to Stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street

Live Feed From Occupy Wall Street: (Courtesy of The Other 99)

Republic Lost

2011-11-16T19:55:00.004-05:00

Iraq all over again?

2011-11-16T12:08:00.009-05:00

Source: F.A.I.R. Media Advisory

Iran, Nukes and the Failure of Skepticism

11/16/11

Much of the corporate media coverage of a new UN report on Iran strongly asserts that Iran is close to building nuclear weapons. But the International Atomic Energy Agency report does not actually arrive at that conclusion, and many critics contend that the speculations that are in the report are misguided.

A USA Today piece (11/9/11) was headlined "UN Agency Issues Red Alert Over Iran's Secret Nuke Program"--with the "red alert" hype coming from a source in the piece, Rep. Ed Royce (R.-Calif.). On CBS Evening News, Scott Pelley reported (11/7/11), "The U.N.'s nuclear agency is expected to report later this week that Iran is on the threshold of being able to build a nuclear bomb."

On ABC World News, anchor Diane Sawyer announced (11/8/11):

And now, a long-dreaded headline about Iran and nuclear weapons. After a decade of debating whether Iran would build one, a UN report says tonight they will, and it has begun.

ABC correspondent Jim Sciutto added that the IAEA found Iran has "been carrying out activities whose sole purpose can only be the development of a nuclear weapon." Sawyer closed the segment by pleading, "Anything else out there to prevent this, to stop it? Is it too late?" She added: "So much for Ahmadinejad claiming it was only nuclear power plants, always nuclear power plants."

On NBC's Today show (11/9/11), viewers were told that the "UN reported for the first time Tuesday that Iran is conducting secret tests with the sole purpose of building nuclear weapons."

"A dreaded headline on Iran," declared ABC This Week host Christiane Amanpour (11/13/11). "UN weapons inspectors reveal new evidence the country is working on a nuclear weapons device. Can the United States do anything to stop it now?"

An Associated Press piece (11/9/11) referred matter-of-factly to Iran being "on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead," and a Washington Post piece (11/14/11) about a Republican presidential debate mentioned ways to "deal with Iran’s apparent nuclear weapons program." A USA Today story (11/14/11) referred to a "United Nations report confirming Iran's nuclear ambitions" and "the strongest finding yet that Iran is going ahead with a bombmaking program." In Time magazine, Joe Klein (11/21/11) wrote, "Even the UN's extremely cautious International Atomic Energy Agency now believes Iran is working on a nuclear weapon."

This rhetoric wildly overstates the actual findings of the IAEA report.

The first part of the agency's November 8 report declares--once again--that Iran is not transferring uranium for use in a military project.

The more explosive allegations that media are focusing on are contained in an annex that attempts to lay out evidence that has been circulating for years. The IAEA report stresses concern over allegations over past activities; very little of the report is dedicated to research that could be describing as ongoing. Indeed, the media is focusing primarily on the IAEA's speculation about what might be ongoing research that could be related to a military program.

But how definitive are the IAEA's findings? As columnist and University of Southern California chemical engineering professor Muhammad Sahimi wrote (Tehran Bureau, 11/9/11):

The most important part of the report deals with alleged work on high conventional explosives, not for conventional weapons, but supposedly for use in triggering a nuclear device. The report discusses in detail fast-functioning detonators, known as "exploding bridgewire detonators" (EBWs), which are needed in nuclear weapons. By the IAEA's own admission, Iran informed the agency in 2008 that it had developed EBWs for use in conventional and civilian applications.

Sahimi points out that the IAEA report admits that "there exist non-nuclear applications, albeit few, for detonators like EBWs." The IAEA report also focuses on design and computer modeling research that it suggests Iran may have pursued. The insinuation is that this research has nuclear dimensions, but there is no solid evidence that this is the case. As Sahimi wrote, some of the apparently worrisome computer modeling

could very well relate to Iran's conventional-warhead missile program that it has never hidden, but has in fact boasted about. Even the IAEA acknowledges such a possibility. The agency itself does not even allege that the enumerated activities are related to a nuclear warhead, but that "they are highly relevant."

Some media coverage suggested the strongest evidence came in the form of a Soviet scientist who allegedly helped Iran with crucial detonator research. The Washington Post (11/7/11) reported that the IAEA was focused on "a former Soviet weapons scientist who allegedly tutored Iranians over several years on building high-precision detonators of the kind used to trigger a nuclear chain reaction."

What the Post did not report was that the scientist in question, Vyacheslav Danilenko, is a well-known researcher in the field of nanodiamonds--the creation of synthetic diamonds that can be used for a variety of industrial pursuits, including oil drilling, an activity that produces the majority of Iran's exports. Inter Press Service reporter Gareth Porter (11/9/11) detailed Danilenko's decades of research in this field, which requires the large-scale detonation chambers that news reports suggest are possibly part of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons research program.

An early critique of the Post story was posted at the Moon of Alabama blog (11/7/11), which noted that Danilenko's nanodiamond research was indeed mentioned in the IAEA report--but missing from the Post's story. The reporter who wrote the Post piece, Joby Warrick, followed up on November 14 with an article focused Danilenko's research--including the background missing from the first piece. Warrick wrote:

Evidence is often ambiguous, as the same technology can sometimes have peaceful as well as military applications. In the case of Danilenko, the scientist’s synthetic-diamonds business provided a plausible explanation for his extensive contacts with senior Iranian scientists over half a decade.

This time around, the Post included Danilenko denying that he had anything to do with a nuclear weapons program. But the paper seemed mostly unconvinced--calling his work, for example, "his diamond-making scheme."

As in the run-up to the Iraq War, it was certainly possible to report skeptically on the Iran intelligence. The Christian Science Monitor's Scott Peterson wrote an excellent report (11/9/11) that began:

The latest United Nations report on Iran's nuclear program may not be the "game changer" it was billed to be, as some nuclear experts raise doubts about the quality of evidence--and point to lack of proof of current nuclear weapons work.

The article quotes former IAEA inspector Robert Kelley, who is dismissive of the agency's analysis. And an NPR Morning Edition segment (11/9/11) began by noting that the agency's new report "was much anticipated, because advanced reporting suggested the IAEA had concluded definitively that Iran is engaged in a full-scale nuclear weapons program. Turns out the report does not say that."

Anyone wondering about the lessons learned from Iraq could find two newspaper editorials, both published November 10, instructive. The New York Times, under the headline "The Truth About Iran," called the IAEA report "chillingly comprehensive" and cheered the agency for standing firm: "The agency did not back down, and neither should anyone else." The Washington Post editorial began:

The International Atomic Energy Agency has now spelled out in detail what governments around the world have known for a long time: Iran's nuclear program has an explicit military dimension.

The paper declared that the IAEA report "ought to end serious debate about whether Tehran's program is for peaceful purposes."

The idea that a journalistic outlet would declare this debate over is profoundly troubling--and suggests that in the corporate media, few lessons have been learned from the Iraq debacle.

See FAIR's Archives for more on:

Iran

War and Militarism

Occupy Fox News

2011-11-09T22:47:00.003-05:00

Want to see these advertisements aired on Fox News and other national television networks?

You can help David Sauvage and his team of activist filmmakers take even more messages of the #Occupy Movement directly to millions of Americans by getting his videos on mainstream TV and as targeted online video ads on YouTube.

Find out how here.

Noam Chomsky on Occupy Movement

2011-11-07T08:48:00.009-05:00

The following is video coverage of Noam Chomsky's address to Occupy Boston protesters on Oct 22, 2011 by a NewsParticipation citizen reporter:

Noam Chomsky interview with RT's Marina Portnaya on Occupy Movement:

See also:

Noam Chomsky on Class War (1995)

Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances

Noam Chomsky: Remembering Fascism: Learning From The Past

Manufacturing Consent

American Foreign Policy: How I Discovered Noam Chomsky

Venezuela without Outraged Protestors: No Cause for Pride

2011-11-06T17:16:00.004-05:00

By Rafael Hernandez Bolívar, November 2nd 2011

Translated by Tamara Pearson for Venezuelanalysis.com

Source: Praxis politica

[Translator’s note: In Venezuela, “los indignados” or the ‘indignant’ or ‘outraged’ people are understood to not just be those protesting in Spain and Europe, but also the occupation movement in the U.S and other countries, and even the protestors in Egypt, Tunisia, and so on]

Some comrades have felt proud of the fact that there are no protests by indignados in Venezuela. They reason more or less the following: We’re going well, we’re resolving the problems of the people and the people are content with the performance of the Bolivarian government, so in our country there are no reasons nor would it make sense to have such protests.

This type of reasoning stems from a lack of understanding of the movements of the indignados. They think such movements are directed against the governments of the countries in which those who are governed aren’t in agreement with their governors. They avoid one fundamental fact: The protests are against an economic system which generates, alongside a few large millionaires (the 1%), unemployment, economic stagnation, housing evictions and property seizures, decrease in quality of life, and in general, misery for the vast majority.

Now then, when governments defend the status quo, the capitalist system, they become targets of protest. It’s what has happened in Greece, Spain, and the U.S. It’s worth mentioning that if the governments, instead of being at the service of capital, united their cause with the people; the indignada protest would clearly be classified as against imperialism and capitalism.

There’s a basic argument as to why any person who considers themselves revolutionary should applaud and support the movement of the indignados. It’s the moral substratum that Ché [Guevara] referred to: To tremble with indignation at every injustice in the world. Just that principal is sufficient. Or would it be that there aren’t enough injustices in the world to merit our protest? This feeling of rage in the face of power and the injustice of thousands of citizens, doesn’t it deserve our solidarity?

But there’s more: Don’t the decisions of the imperialist financial centres affect us? Have we defeated capitalism and now we’re living in a socialist society? We are, up to this point, just a project that is struggling to become reality. Our values, our economy, despite the efforts and the achievements of the Bolivarian Revolution, are still structured around large capitalist schemes and we have, in that sense, strong reasons to be outraged.

There is a revealing fact. In our country two large fronts have clearly taken shape in our political realty: the forces for change and revolution, and on the other side, the forces of reaction. Any political event that occurs in the country locates these forces on one side or the other. To take the other side of the argument, is it possible that the Venezuelan opposition takes on the flag of the indiganados to fight the government? Can we imagine Capriles Radonsky, Maria Corina Machado, Leopoldo Lopez, or Pablo Perez [translator: all of whom are hoping to be the opposition candidate in presidential elections next year] chanting things like “prison for the bankers”, “death to capitalism”, “don’t sacrifice the 99% for the well being and luxury of the 1%” and other similar demands that the indignados are voicing at their protests? It’s not possible to imagine it. The defenders of capitalism can’t attack the interests of the powerful.

The struggle of the indignados is a struggle against injustice and for that reason it is also our struggle. It is the denunciation of capitalism and the consequences of all that it generates and that we tolerate. It’s the prevalence of values of solidarity and the preservation of the planet. And all these things form part of the revolutionary arsenal and as such, are ours.

Another thing is that until now the movement hasn’t developed levels of consciousness or commitment that lead to decisive actions against capitalism. Nor is anyone in a position to propose that that would be its inexorable destiny. But, we all have the responsibility to contribute so that the movement develops along those lines. It would be extraordinary if the next worldwide call of the movement of the indignados were made here in Caracas – a large concentration of solidarity where we express our unequivocal rejection of the perverse consequences of capitalism: war, exploitation, destruction of the planet, the large social problems it generates, etc!

J. Krishnamurti on Education and World Peace

2011-11-05T00:10:00.005-04:00

From "Education and The Significance of Life" (1981)

Chapter 4: Education and World Peace

TO DISCOVER what part education can play in the present world crisis, we should understand how that crisis has come into being. It is obviously the result of wrong values in our relationship to people, to property and to ideas. If our relationship with others is based on self-aggrandizement, and our relationship to property is acquisitive, the structure of society is bound to be competitive and self-isolating. If in our relationship with ideas we justify one ideology in opposition to another, mutual distrust and ill will are the inevitable results.

Another cause of the present chaos is dependence on authority, on leaders, whether in daily life, in the small school or in the university. Leaders and their authority are deteriorating factors in any culture. When we follow another there is no understanding, but only fear and conformity, eventually leading to the cruelty of the totalitarian State and the dogmatism of organized religion.

To rely on governments, to look to organizations and authorities for that peace which must begin with the under- standing of ourselves, is to create further and still greater conflict; and there can be no lasting happiness as long as we accept a social order in which there is endless strife and antagonism between man and man. If we want to change existing conditions, we must first transform ourselves, which means that we must become aware of our own actions, thoughts and feelings in everyday life.

But we do not really want peace, we do not want to put an end to exploitation. We will not allow our greed to be interfered with, or the foundations of our present social structure to be altered; we want things to continue as they are with only superficial modifications, and so the powerful, the cunning inevitably rule our lives.

Peace is not achieved through any ideology, it does not depend on legislation; it comes only when we as individuals begin to understand our own psychological process. If we avoid the responsibility of acting individually and wait for some new system to establish peace, we shall merely become the slaves of that system.

When governments, dictators, big business and the clerically powerful begin to see that this increasing antagonism between men only leads to indiscriminate destruction and is therefore no longer profitable, they may force us, through legislation and other means of compulsion, to suppress our personal cravings and ambitions and to co-operate for the well-being of mankind. just as we are now educated and encouraged to be competitive and ruthless, so then we shall be compelled to respect one another and to work for the world as a whole. And even though we may all be well fed, clothed and sheltered, we shall not be free of our conflicts and antagonisms, which will merely have shifted to another plane, where they will be still more diabolical and devastating. The only moral or righteous action is voluntary, and understanding alone can bring peace and happiness to man.

Beliefs, ideologies and organized religions are setting us against our neighbours; there is conflict, not only among different societies, but among groups within the same society. We must realize that as long as we identify ourselves with a country, as long as we cling to security, as long as we are conditioned by dogmas, there will be strife and misery both within ourselves and in the world.

Then there is the whole question of patriotism. When do we feel patriotic? It is obviously not an everyday emotion. But we are sedulously encouraged to be patriotic through school-books, through newspapers and other channels of propaganda, which stimulate racial egotism by praising national heroes and telling us that our own country and way of life are better than others. This patriotic spirit feeds our vanity from childhood to old age.

The constantly repeated assertion that we belong to a certain political or religious group, that we are of this nation or of that, flatters our little egos, puffs them out like sails, until we are ready to kill or be killed for our country, race or ideology. It is all so stupid and unnatural. Surely, human beings are more important than national and ideological boundaries.

The separative spirit of nationalism is spreading like fire all over the world. Patriotism is cultivated and cleverly exploited by those who are seeking further expansion, wider powers, greater enrichment; and each one of us takes part in this process, for we also desire these things. Conquering other lands and other people provides new markets for goods as well as for political and religious ideologies.

One must look at all these expressions of violence and antagonism with an unprejudiced mind, that is, with a mind that does not identify itself with any country, race or ideology, but tries to find out what is true. There is great joy in seeing a thing clearly without being influenced by the notions and instructions of others, whether they be the government, the specialists or the very learned. Once we really see that patriotism is a hindrance to human happiness, we do not have to struggle against this false emotion in ourselves, it has gone from us forever.

Nationalism, the patriotic spirit, class and race consciousness, are all ways of the self, and therefore separative. After all, what is a nation but a group of individuals living together for economic and self-protective reasons ? Out of fear and acquisitive self defence arises the idea of `my country," with its boundaries and tariff walls, rendering brotherhood and the unity of man impossible.

The desire to gain and to hold, the longing to be identified with something greater than ourselves, creates the spirit of nationalism; and nationalism breeds war. In every country the government, encouraged by organized religion, is upholding nationalism and the separative spirit. Nationalism is a disease, and it can never bring about world unity. We can not attain health through disease, we must first free ourselves from the disease.

It is because we are nationalists, ready to defend our sovereign States, our beliefs and acquisitions, that we must be perpetually armed. Property and ideas have become more important to us than human life, so there is constant antagonism and violence between ourselves and others. By maintaining the sovereignty of our country, we are destroying our sons; by worshipping the State, which is but a projection of ourselves, we are sacrificing our children to our own gratification. Nationalism and sovereign governments are the causes and the instruments of war.

Our present social institutions cannot evolve into a world federation, for their very foundations are unsound. Parliaments and systems of education which uphold national sovereignty and emphasize the importance of the group will never bring war to an end. Every separate group of people, with its rulers and its ruled, is a source of war. As long as we do not fundamentally alter the present relationship between man and man, industry will inevitably lead to confusion and become an instrument of destruction and misery; as long as there is violence and tyranny, deceit and propaganda, the brotherhood of man cannot be realized.

Merely to educate people to be wonderful engineers, brilliant scientists, capable executives, able workmen, will never bring the oppressors and the oppressed together; and we can see that our present system of education, which sustains the many causes that breed enmity and hatred between human beings, has not prevented mass murder in the name of one's country or in the name of God.

Organized religions, with their temporal and spiritual authority, are equally incapable of bringing peace to man, for they also are the outcome of our ignorance and fear, of our make-believe and egotism.

Craving security here or in the hereafter, we create institutions and ideologies which guarantee that security; but the more we struggle for security, the less we shall have it. The desire to be secure only fosters division and increases antagonism. If we deeply feel and understand the truth of this, not merely verbally or intellectually, but with our whole being, then we shall begin to alter fundamentally our relationship with our fellow men in the immediate world about us; and only then is there a possibility of achieving unity and brotherhood.

Most of us are consumed by all sorts of fears, and are greatly concerned about our own security. We hope that, by some miracle, wars will come to an end, all the while accusing other national groups of being the instigators of war, as they in turn blame us for the disaster. Although war is so obviously detrimental to society, we prepare for war and develop in the young the military spirit.

But has military training any place in education? It all depends on what kind of human beings we want our children to be. If we want them to be efficient killers, then military training is necessary. If we want to discipline them and regiment their minds, if our purpose is to make them nationalistic and therefore irresponsible to society as a whole, then military training is a good way to do it. If we like death and destruction, military training is obviously important. It is the function of generals to plan and carry on war; and if our intention is to have constant battle between ourselves and our neighbours, then by all means let us have more generals.

If we are living only to have endless strife within ourselves and with others, if our desire is to perpetuate bloodshed and misery, then there must be more soldiers, more politicians, more enmity - which is what is actually happening. Modern civilization is based on violence, and is therefore courting death. As long as we worship force, violence will be our way of life. But if we want peace, if we want right relationship among men, whether Christian or Hindu, Russian or American, if we want our children to be integrated human beings, then military training is an absolute hindrance, it is the wrong way to set about it.

One of the chief causes of hatred and strife is the belief that a particular class or race is superior to another. The child is neither class nor race conscious; it is the home or school environment, or both, which makes him feel separative. In himself he does not care whether his playmate is a Negro or a Jew, a Brahmin or a non-Brahmin; but the influence of the whole social structure is continually impinging on his mind, affecting and shaping it.

Here again the problem is not with the child but with the adults, who have created a senseless environment of separatism and false values.

What real basis is there for differentiating between human beings? Our bodies may be different in structure and colour, our faces may be dissimilar, but inside the skin we are very much alike: proud, ambitious, envious, violent, sexual, power-seeking and so on. Remove the label and we are very naked; but we do not want to face our nakedness, and so we insist on the label - which indicates how immature, how really infantile we are.

To enable the child to grow up free from prejudice, one has first to break down all prejudice within oneself, and then in one's environment - which means breaking down the structure of this thoughtless society which we have created. At home we may tell the child how absurd it is to be conscious of one's class or race, and he will probably agree with us; but when he goes to school and plays with other children, he becomes contaminated by the separative spirit. Or it may be the other way around: the home may be traditional, narrow, and the school's influence may be broader. In either case there is a constant battle between the home and the school environments. and the child is caught between the two.

To raise a child sanely, to help him to be perceptive so that he sees through these stupid prejudices, we have to be in close relationship with him. We have to talk things over and let him listen to intelligent conversation; we have to encourage the spirit of inquiry and discontent which is already in him, thereby helping him to discover for himself what is true and what is false.

It is constant inquiry, true dissatisfaction, that brings creative intelligence; but to keep inquiry and discontent awake is extremely arduous, and most people do not want their children to have this kind of intelligence, for it is very uncomfortable to live with someone who is constantly questioning accepted values.

All of us are discontented when we are young, but unfortunately our discontent soon fades away, smothered by our imitative tendencies and our worship of authority. As we grow older, we begin to crystallize, to be satisfied and apprehensive. We become executives, priests, bank clerks, factory managers, technicians, and slow decay sets in. Because we desire to maintain our positions, we support the destructive society,which has placed us there and given us some measure of security.

Government control of education is a calamity. There is no hope of peace and order in the world as long as education is the handmaid of the state or of organized religion. Yet more and more governments are taking charge of the children and their future; and if it is not the government, then it is the religious organizations which seek to control education.

This conditioning of the child's mind to fit a particular ideology, whether political or religious, breeds enmity between man and man. In a competitive society we cannot have brotherhood, and no reform, no dictatorship, no educational method can bring it about.

As long as you remain a New Zealander and I a Hindu, it is absurd to talk about the unity of man. How can we get together as human beings if you in your country, and I in mine, retain our respective religious prejudices and eco- nomic ways? How can there be brotherhood as long as patriotism is separating man from man, and millions are restricted by depressed economic conditions while others are well off? How can there be human unity when beliefs divide us, when there is domination of one group by another, when the rich are powerful and the poor are seeking that same power, when there is maldistribution of land, when some are well fed and multitudes are starving?

One of our difficulties is that we are not really in earnest about these matters, because we do not want to be greatly disturbed. We prefer to alter things only in a manner advantageous to ourselves, and so we are not deeply concerned about our own emptiness and cruelty.

Can we ever attain peace through violence? Is peace to be achieved gradually, through a slow process of time? Surely, love is not a matter of training or of time. The last two wars were fought for democracy, I believe; and now we are preparing for a still greater and more destructive war, and people are less free. But what would happen if we were to put aside such obvious hindrances to understanding as authority, belief, nationalism and the whole hierarchical spirit? We would be people without authority, human beings in direct relationship with one another - and then, perhaps, there would be love and compassion.

What is essential in education, as in every other field, is to have people who are understanding and affectionate, whose hearts are not filled with empty phrases, with the things of the mind.

If life is meant to be lived happily, with thought, with ourselves; and if we wish to build a truly enlightened society, we must have educators who understand the ways of integration and who are therefore capable of imparting that understanding to the child.

Such educators would be a danger to the present structure of society. But we do not really want to build an enlightened society; and any teacher who, perceiving the full implications of peace, began to point out the true significance of nationalism and the stupidity of war, would soon lose his position. Knowing this, most teachers compromise, and thereby help to maintain the present system of exploitation and violence.

Surely, to discover truth, there must be freedom from strife, both within ourselves and with our neighbours. When we are not in conflict within ourselves, we are not in conflict outwardly. It is the inward strife which, projected outwardly, becomes the world conflict.

War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarrelling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder.

Education throughout the world has failed, it has produced mounting destruction and misery. Governments are training the young to be the efficient soldiers and technicians they need; regimentation and prejudice are being cul- tivated and enforced. Taking these facts into consideration, we have to inquire into the meaning of existence and the significance and purpose of our lives. We have to discover the beneficent ways of creating a new environment; for environment can make the child a brute, an unfeeling specialist, or help him to become a sensitive, intelligent human being. We have to create a world government which is radically different, which is not based on nationalism, on ideologies, on force.

All this implies the understanding of our responsibility to one another in relationship; but to understand our responsibility, there must be love in our hearts, not mere learning or knowledge. The greater our love, the deeper will be its influence on society. But we are all brains and no heart; we cultivate the intellect and despise humility. If we really loved our children, we would want to save and protect them, we would not let them be sacrificed in wars.

I think we really want arms; we like the show of military power, the uniforms, the rituals, the drinks, the noise, the violence. Our everyday life is a reflection in miniature of this same brutal superficiality, and we are destroying one another through envy and thoughtlessness.

We want to be rich; and the richer we get, the more ruthless we become, even though we may contribute large sums to charity and education. Having robbed the victim, we return to him a little of the spoils, and this we call philanthropy. I do not think we realize what catastrophes we are preparing. Most of us live each day as rapidly and thoughtlessly as possible, and leave to the governments, to the cunning politicians, the direction of our lives.

All sovereign governments must prepare for war, and one's own government is no exception. To make its citizens efficient for war, to prepare them to perform their duties effectively, the government must obviously control and dominate them. They must be educated to act as machines, to be ruthlessly efficient. If the purpose and end of life is to destroy or be destroyed, then education must encourage ruthlessness; and I am not at all sure that that is not what we inwardly desire, for ruthlessness goes with the worship of success.

The sovereign State does not want its citizens to be free, to think for themselves, and it controls them through propaganda, through distorted historical interpretations and so on. That is why education is becoming more and more a means of teaching what to think and not how to think. If we were to think independently of the prevailing political system, we would be dangerous; free institutions might turn out pacifists or people who think contrary to the existing regime.

Right education is obviously a danger to sovereign governments - and so it is prevented by crude or subtle means. Education and food in the hands of the few have become the means of controlling man; and governments, whether of the left or of the right, are unconcerned as long as we are efficient machines for turning out merchandise and bullets.

Now, the fact that this is happening the world over means that we who are the citizens and educators, and who are responsible for the existing governments, do not fundamen- tally care whether there is freedom or slavery, peace or war, well-being or misery for man. We want a little reform here and there, but most of us are afraid to tear down the present society and build a completely new structure, for this would require a radical transformation of ourselves.

On the other hand, there are those who seek to bring about a violent revolution. Having helped to build the existing social order with all its conflicts, confusion and misery, they now desire to organize a perfect society. But can any of us organize a perfect society when it is we who have brought into being the present one? To believe that peace can be achieved through violence is to sacrifice the present for a future ideal; and this seeking of a right end through wrong means is one of the causes of the present disaster.

The expansion and predominance of sensate values necessarily creates the poison of nationalism, of economic frontiers, sovereign governments and the patriotic spirit, all of which excludes man's co-operation with man and corrupts human relationship, which is society. Society is the relationship between you and another; and without deeply understanding this relationship, not at any one level, but integrally, as a total process, we are bound to create again the same kind of social structure, however superficially modified.

If we are to change radically our present human relationship, which has brought untold misery to the world, our only and immediate task is to transform ourselves through self-knowledge. So we come back to the central point, which is oneself; but we dodge that point and shift the respon- sibility onto governments, religions and ideologies. The government is what we are, religions and ideologies are but a projection of ourselves; and until we change fundamentally there can be neither right education nor a peaceful world.

Outward security for all can come only when there is love and intelligence; and since we have created a world of conflict and misery in which outward security is rapidly becoming impossible for anyone, does it not indicate the utter futility of past and present education? As parents and teachers it is our direct responsibility to break away from traditional thinking, and not merely rely on the experts and their findings. Efficiency in technique has given us a certain capacity to earn money, and that is why most of us are satisfied with the present social structure; but the true educator is concerned only with right living, right education, and right means of livelihood.

The more irresponsible we are in these matters, the more the State takes over all responsibility. We are confronted, not with a political or economic crisis, but with a crisis of human deterioration which no political party or economic system can avert.

Another and still greater disaster is approaching dangerously close, and most of us are doing nothing whatever about it. We go on day after day exactly as before; we do not want to strip away all our false values and begin anew. We want to do patchwork reform, which only leads to problems of still further reform. But the building is crumbling, the walls are giving way, and fire is destroying it. We must leave the building and start on new ground, with different foundations, different values.

We cannot discard technical knowledge, but we can become inwardly aware of our ugliness, of our ruthlessness, of our deceptions and dishonesty, our utter lack of love. Only by intelligently freeing ourselves from the spirit of nationalism, from envy and the thirst for power, can a new social order be established.

Peace is not to be achieved by patchwork reform, nor by a mere rearrangement of old ideas and superstitions. There can be peace only when we understand what lies beyond the superficial, and thereby stop this wave of destruction which has been unleashed by our own aggressiveness and fears; and only then will there be hope for our children and salvation for the world.

See also:

Zeitgeist Moving Forward:

Zeitgeist Addendum:

Noam Chomsky on Class War

2011-11-04T20:10:00.005-04:00

"You have to create a mood of anti-politics where everything is blamed on the government... and that has been done. People are deeply confused about the source of their problems... Which is simply putting more power in the hands of the private tyrannies which are unaccountable." - Noam Chomsky

The above excerpt is from Chomsky's lecture on Class Warfare and the corporate attack on working people in this nation and around the globe. At a time when corporate profits are booming as millions suffer from oppression and exploitation, Chomsky's insightful words shared more than a decade ago couldn't be more relevant and with dead on accuracy today.

Listen below:

Occupy your mind.

See also:

Noam Chomsky on Occupy Movement

Noam Chomsky: Remembering Fascism: Learning From The Past

Manufacturing Consent

American Foreign Policy: How I Discovered Noam Chomsky

A Wake Up Call to the People - PUSHNATION

2011-11-02T18:59:00.015-04:00

I stand in awe at how many people in this world cannot grasp the bigger picture or who don't understand what the Occupy Movement is ultimately about.

As Noam Chomsky said recently at the Occupy Boston encampment on Dewey Square:

For the first time in human history, there are real threats to the survival of the human species. Since 1945 we have had nuclear weapons, and it seems a miracle we have survived them. But policies of the Obama administration and its allies are encouraging escalation.

The other threat, of course, is environmental catastrophe. Practically every country in the world is taking at least halting steps to do something about it. The United States is taking steps backward. A propaganda system, openly acknowledged by the business community, declares that climate change is all a liberal hoax: Why pay attention to these scientists?

If this intransigence continues in the richest, most powerful country in the world, the catastrophe won't be averted.

Something must be done in a disciplined, sustained way, and soon. It won't be easy to proceed. There will be hardships and failures, it's inevitable. But unless the process that's taking place here and elsewhere in the country and around the world continues to grow and becomes a major force in society and politics, the chances for a decent future are bleak.

You can't achieve significant initiatives without a large, active, popular base. It's necessary to get out into the country and help people understand what the Occupy movement is about, what they themselves can do, and what the consequences are of not doing anything.

"You cant stay neutral on a moving train." - Howard Zinn

Zoom Out

I've written previously about Zooming Out in the 21st Century because thanks to our corporate dominated airwaves, you can't get the bigger picture unless you seek out truly independent sources.

It's not difficult to imagine just how hard is for most to see the forest from the trees with all the eloquently crafted explanations for our problems that have been put forth by the people in power to placate and divide us. A handful of corporations control and filter the majority of the information we're spoon fed daily on the television, radio, and other news outlets.

I found this out the hard way after I submitted some of my own work to the Huffington Post and was told baldly by a deputy editor, "they aren't right for the site."

I suppose since I'm not down with the facade --- or the Obama 2012, "Change We'll Never Perceive" bandwagon --- my independent thoughts just aren't "right" for a pretend populous publication/celebrity tabloid.

The reality is my brothers and sisters, we're on our own, as we have been and forever will be until we unite and PUSH for real change. Not a change in tax or interest rates --- but a change in the way this corrupt system works.

PUSHNATION

Recently, my brother Skinner Louis, Esq. began sending out inspirational messages on Facebook. These messages have evolved into more than just inspiration --- they are molding into an online movement -- one which he has properly coined as PUSHNATION.

His latest status explains the movement as follows:

If I could explain PUSHNATION, it would be as a border less unification of people across the world through our souls. See the soul speaks to us, but we rarely listen. PUSHNATION is an idea that we are all connected, rich, poor, black, white, intelligent, ignorant, etc., yet our superficial differences have caused unnecessary division. Such division which only benefits a small few. PUSHNATION is the reunification of our humanistic connection. As a realist, I never expect all humans to get along, but I never expected the technology Steve Jobs and so many others have created either. Expectations are limited by one's vision and my vision has expanded beyond myself and my small circle. I strive for wealth, so I may finance the change I believe in. Therefore, PUSHNATION is about profit for a purpose, since most corporations seem to have only aligned themselves with profit for self. PUSHNATION is about equilibrium, since the scales have been tilted so one-sided. PUSHNATION is about intellectual honesty since those charged to protect us have manipulated our trust. PUSHNATION is for a new generation of thinkers. PUSHNATION will facilitate conversations. The thugs, drug dealers, and gang bangers, will be forced to speak with the students, professionals, and educators. The rich will be forced to speak with the poor. The intelligent will be forced to speak with the ignorant. Why will this happen? Because PUSHNATION will not allow anyone to no longer live in their pleasant little bubbles safeguarded from the pollution surrounding them. PUSHNATION, shall pop all bubbles and say come see the reality of what is going on. This will not be a pleasant lifestyle because there are many critical unpleasant things we must address. But, I promise that we will grow a better nation from within that we will refuse to live without. Therefore, PUSHING the world around us to change. PUSHNATION!

I stand with Skinner and the rest of PUSHNATION when I say:

United we PUSH, divided we perish.

"You can't fool all the people all of the time, but if you fool the right ones, the rest will fall behind." - Dead Prez

The revolution will not be televised. We must weed out the Judas goats amongst and around us --- steering us to the butcher. We must awaken the drug-induced drones selfishly wandering the Earth. We need to turn off our the State-run radio and television, and convince those in our sphere of influence to do the same. PUSH

Instead of glorifying a senseless value system by being caught up in Hollywood drama or living in our Disney Worlds, we need to each thoroughly evaluate the true nature of the world and the systems that both confine us and divide us within it. We must not accept any "this is as good as it gets" or "well it's not that bad (for me)" mentalities. PUSH

Knowledge is power; re-educating ourselves, developing objective critical thinking skills, and sharing truly independent, bias-free thought and analysis is the only way to unlock the ultimate Truth in reality. PUSH

The technology is here to connect us -- to finally allow us as an entire species to share a single consciousness. But in order to achieve that though we must destroy the artificial barriers that separate us. PUSH

Silence is acquiescence.

When you see something that isn't right --- when you see someone spewing venomous hatred and lies --- when you see oppression and exploitation --- don't stand idle by and allow it to happen. PUSH

There will be no results without the People united, working together for the common good. Not just agreeing --- but mobilizing --- eac and every Slave must stand as one.

PUSHNATION

Blog that.

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

See related:

Occupy Everything

Noam Chomsky: Occupy the Future

Howard Zinn: A People's History of the United States

Why We Need To Put An End To The Monetary System Immediately

2011-10-29T15:38:00.009-04:00

Originally posted by Dave Early

Money = Debt and Slavery

I don't know about you, but I've always hated money. Statistics reveal that the majority of our problems are caused because of money alone. Thanks to money, we are forced to deal with greed, corruption, debt, and many other issues. We all need money to live though, right? That's what the banks want us to believe, but you see, where there is money, there will inevitably be debt. We have debt because we have money.

Where does this money come from?

The Federal Reserve Bank creates our money, and then loans it out to other banks on interest. So, technically any money that is "created" needs to eventually be payed back to the banks plus interest. In actuality, there was never any money in the first place, and there also wasn't money within the system to cover the interest the banks require. The monetary system ensures that people will always be in debt because our money is created through debt. As if that wasn't bad enough, we also must deal with inflation because more money is always being "created", raising our debt, and devaluing the money that we already use.

To stop this from happening, President Andrew Jackson, shut down the Central Bank in 1835 that preceded the Federal Reserve. This was the last time that America was debt free. President Jackson said, "The bold efforts the present bank has made to control the Government... are but premonitions of the fate that awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this Institution, or the establishment of another like it."

Unfortunately, the Federal Reserve came into existence in 1913, and has ensured that perpetual debt continues to thrive. In this system, we will ALWAYS have debt, inflation, foreclosures, and people that can't pay off their debts. True wealth, as we have let it become, only belongs to the banks and not the people.

Money was created out of nothing, people, and we have let it become everything. 3% of our entire money supply is just some paper, while the rest is merely a bunch of numbers, to which only we give value. It ensures that we are constantly in debt, and are slaves to the system.

What is slavery?

Slavery: Bondage; the state of being under the control of something.

Slavery: Being entirely dominated by some influence or person.

Slavery: A social-economic system under which people are deprived of personal freedom.

We are all in debt, and what do people do when they are in debt? They submit to work for someone to pay off the debt that is owed. For the most part, we go to work for someone that we don't want to work for, and we do something that we probably don't want to do. Why? This is how the system was set up to operate. Is this not modern slavery? The wage slave is kept in line by this system, powering the empire that was set up. The debt that was created can never be paid off, and this is exactly how the system was set up.

Debt is being used to conquer and enslave nations.

More Problems Caused by Money

Many of us believe that we are a free people, but not only does money keep us from being free, it actually is the root cause of many of our daily problems. We know all about greed and corruption. Just think; if we had no monetary system, there would be no reason for people to steal, and to try and fight their way to the top of the pyramid. Over half of the whole world lives on less than $2 a day, while the greedy, corrupt people at the top of our financial system benefit from each and every one of us, and all of the bad things that happen thanks to this system. So many problems would instantly vanish if we ditched the system that has made us into modern day slaves.

Profit controls the motives of the people in our economy. Businesses are not concerned about your well being because that would be bad for business. Businesses are concerned about making a profit first and foremost. That is also the reason why we have products that do not last, and remain scarce. If we could get products that lasted and were readily available, this would also be bad for business. With a monetary system intact, businesses will never be concerned with ethics, morals, and the benefit of the consumer. If they did so, businesses would not last and the system would not work as it was designed.

War, crime, and poverty will always persist within this system as well. We tend to think these are things that simply happen because we fail to understand how this system was set up, and why it continues to operate. There is strong evidence suggesting that war, crime, and poverty are a direct result of the monetary system that we have in place, and would be greatly reduced if we became resource based, instead of monetary based. However, many people throughout the world have nothing right now. Many people are dying right now. People have been historically concerned about themselves, overall, and have not loved each other. This is sad, sick, and uncivilized.

Does money improve your life?

What is money? Money is nothing! It is a bunch of paper or numbers used to control the masses. Money can do nothing but enslave those who want it, while empowering those who have all of it. When we rid ourselves of this burden that we assume we need for everyday life, we take away the power that we alone have given to those at the top of the pyramid, we take away the scam, and we greatly reduce the consequences of this system that persist each day, and would otherwise continue to persist.

As long as we continue in the direction we are heading, we will also continue to see; crimes related to the monetary system (roughly 80%), greed, corruption, power and wealth consolidation, labor abuse, social stratification, a dictatorship based on wealth, as well as technological paralysis. These are the things that our current system provokes. If you are okay with these things, you don't need to do anything because they will continue in a monetary system. That's one thing you can count on. However, if you loathe these things such as I do, then do something about it.

It's time to wake up! We have let ourselves become burdened with this for far too long. Instead of wondering whether or not we have enough money to get something done, we could be gathering the necessary resources and technology to accomplish things; things from which our current system has held us back.

Below you will find a video, from which I have gathered the majority of my information. The video explains so much more, and much better than I can myself. Feel free to watch it and leave any comments you like. Being about 2 hours, the video is longer than most movies, so you may have to allow yourself adequate time to watch it, but it's definitely worth the time. Thanks for reading and commenting.

What They Said About Money

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sin... But if you want to continue to be slaves of the bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let the bankers continue to create money and control credit." - Josiah Charles Stamp

“Time is more valuable than money. You can get more money, but you cannot get more time.” - Jim Rohn

“Money never made a man happy yet, nor will it. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one.” - Benjamin Franklin

“So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of all money?” - Ayn Rand

“Money often costs too much.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." - 1 Timothy 6:10

“You have not lived a perfect day, even though you have earned your money, unless you have done something for someone who will never be able to repay you.” - Ruth Smeltzer

“Go out in the world and work like money doesn't matter, Sing as if no one is listening, Love as if you have never been hurt, and Dance as if no one is watching.”

“Money will buy you a fine dog, but only love can make it wag its tail.” - Richard Friedman

“Don't tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I'll tell you what they are.” - James W. Frick

"Money and power facilitate, but it is clear that they are not the primary causes of, happiness and solving our problems." - Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

"Money won't make you happy... but everybody wants to find out for themselves." - Zig Ziglar

“If you want to see what God thinks of money, just look at all the people He gave it to.” - Dorothy Parker

“Money and women are the most sought after and the least known about of any two things we have.” - Will Rogers

“Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.” - Henry David Thoreau

"There is no satisfying the senses, not even with a shower of money." - Buddha

“While money can't buy happiness, it certainly lets you choose your own form of misery.”

“Money is like love; it kills slowly and painfully the one who withholds it, and enlivens the other who turns it on his fellow man.” - Kahlil Gibran

“We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much.” - Ronald Reagan

"A rich man is nothing but a poor man with money." - W.C. Fields

"Wealth is not due to plenty of money, but wealth is the wealth of the self." - Muhammad

"The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine." - George Bernard Shaw

"Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody." Benjamin Franklin

"The rich are the scum of the earth in every country." - G.K. Chesterton

" The chief value of money lies in the fact that one lives in a world in which it is overestimated." - H.L. Mencken

"Make money your god and it will plague you like the devil." - Henry Fielding

"No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather." - Michael Pritchard

"Money: There's nothing in the world so demoralizing as money." - Sophocles

Related Links

Free Education: Banking 101

Zeitgeist Addendum:

The Venus Project

A Glimpse of A World Without Money

Zeitgeist Addendum Transcript (PDF)

You Can't Take My Soul

2011-10-28T17:46:00.003-04:00

"My Soul" - by Lowkey

They say the fool thinks himself to be wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.

I say that, to say this.

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but might can't take my soul

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but you can't take my soul

They can't use my music to advertise for Coca Cola
They can't use my music to advertise for Motorola
They can't use my music to advertise for anything
But truth, I guess that's the reason the industry won't let me in
Refuse to be a product or brand, I'm human
Refuse to contribute to the gangster illusion
Whether I'm number one, number two, or number Three
I'm unique and there will never be another me
And there never be another you
Be proud of who you are, don't copy what the others do
They are not superior, you are not inferior
When we realize that is gonna be hysteria
Not commercial, always controversial what my pen has written
When they listen many have risen from the mental prison
That's why you don't see my face upon the television
But every time I try to sleep I hear the devil singing

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but you can't take my soul

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but you can't take my soul

They can't use my music to advertise your watch or your car
They can't use my music to advertise a drink you got at the bar
They can't use my music to advertise for anything
But truth, I guess that's the reason the industry won't let me in
My integrity is the reason I'm thinking separately
Keep your three-sixty I can do this independently
It's likely I'm quite mad -- why?
Cos I say with ease slavery gave the streets Nike's and iPad's
They don't like my rhymes, say my style is like lecture
But I'd rather die, than smile with my oppressor
I'm an honorable student with the facts on your Judas
You're not Hip Hop or Grime, your just McDonald's music
Not commercial, always controversial what my pen has written
When they listen many have risen from the mental prison
That's why you don't see my face upon the television
But every time I try to sleep I hear the devil singing

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but you can't take my soul

You might take my life,
but you can't take my soul

You might take my freedom
but you can't take my soul

PUSHNATION

Michael Moore on Occupy Movement, Jobs Crisis

2011-10-27T13:55:00.006-04:00

This Is Not Enormous Progress Obama

2011-10-26T11:36:00.010-04:00

Today Obama announced that he has loosened the harnesses on the backs of American students by slightly adjusting federal policy on student loans.

I personally received this message via email from Robert Rodriguez, the "Special Assistant to the President for Education Policy" announcing what the White House mischaracterizes as, "enormous" change:

Official White House Response to Forgive Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy and Usher in a New Era of Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Prosperity, by Robert Rodriguez:

Thank you for taking the time to participate in the “We the People” petition process. We launched this online tool as a way of hearing directly from you, and are pleased that you have responded by presenting this idea.

We agree that reducing the burden of student loans is an effective way to stimulate the economy and save taxpayer dollars. That's why we're excited to announce a new policy that speaks to the concerns expressed in this petition.

First some background. About two-thirds of college graduates have taken out loans to help pay for their education, with an average student borrower owing over $23,000. This debt is particularly burdensome for graduates who enter lower-paying careers, suffer setbacks such as unemployment or serious illness, or fail to complete their degrees.

Our Administration recognizes that higher education is a needed investment to compete for the jobs of the twenty-first century, but acknowledges the great financial burden that it places on many American students and families. As an Administration, we are committed to making college more affordable so that all Americans can gain access to an education that will enable them to succeed in a global economy increasingly based on knowledge and innovation. As President Obama has stated, “in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to college.”

The federal student loan program allows students the option to invest in their own future and this option is one that requires responsibility on the part of students as well as institutions of higher learning. We know many borrowers across the nation are struggling to keep up with student loan payments. That’s why we have taken action to help reduce monthly loan payments when they become too burdensome, while at the same time keeping the student loan program fiscally sound so we can invest in the next generation of students.

Our income based repayment (IBR) policy is a prime example of doing just that: it allows students to repay student loans based on the income they make, rather than the standard 10-year repayment plan. Currently, IBR allows hundreds of thousands of borrowers to cap their loan payments at 15% of their discretionary income and have all remaining debt forgiven after 25 years of payment. This program allows students to reduce their loan payments by hundreds of dollars a month in many cases, while keeping the loans in good standing. For example, a student borrower with an income of $30,000 and a loan debt of $25,000 will see their monthly student loan payments reduced by $116.

To give students additional help, Congress enacted a proposal in 2010 to have IBR borrowers cap their payments at 10% instead of 15% and have all their debt forgiven after 20 years instead of 25 years. These changes were scheduled to go into effect in 2014. However, the Administration is announcing today that these benefits will go into effect two years earlier, in 2012, to provide an even greater benefit to students in college now.

We are also announcing that borrowers can now consolidate their loans from the Direct Loan (DL) program and the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program into one loan. This will give borrowers the convenience of a single payment to a single lender – which makes it less likely that borrowers will default. Borrowers would also receive up to a 0.5 percent reduction to their interest rate, which means lower monthly payments.

As President Obama has explained, American students face a paradox: “at the very moment it's never been more important to have a quality higher education, the cost of that kind of that kind of education has never been higher.” Over the past three decades college tuition has grown 10 times faster than a typical family's income, making higher education unattainable for many; however, more than 60% of jobs in the next decade will require more than a high school diploma. It is more important than ever for Americans to get a good education to stay ahead in an increasingly global economy.

If we want to remain competitive as a nation, we must continue to create ways for all Americans to afford higher education. In addition to capping student loan repayments, the Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act helped increase the maximum Pell Grant to $5,500 and saved taxpayers billions by cutting out banks as middlemen. Because of this reform, there will be over 800,000 additional Pell Grants awarded over the next 10 years and the value of Pell Grants will be able to keep up with additional college costs.

We know that these steps don’t solve all our problems in higher education. There is still more work to be done to make it possible for every American to earn a quality education. But enormous progress has been made. And by continuing to raise your voices and call for change, you will help to open the doors of higher education to all Americans.

After receiving news of this adjustment in policy, some of my fellow law school grads rejoiced. But unlike those who can accept these accommodations in "something is better than nothing" fashion, I refuse to believe that this is as good as it gets.

It is unquestionable that Obama has missed the point of our petitions. We want REAL change. We want a change in the way this system works. We shouldn't be indentured servants to banks and for-profit educational institutions.

These accommodations merely slightly ease the suffering of graduate students. They do not prevent the lifetime of indentured servitude for college students who are not fortunate enough to be one of the "average" students with $20k in loans -- like I who has over $100k in student loans or many other students have double or triple that.

This minor adjustment in policy is nowhere near enough to address the bigger issue of exploitation by for-profit educational institutions and the financial industry. We need real change -- a change in the way this predatory system works.

Instead this puppet administration is continuing to flood more and more of our children into for-profit institutions to chase the dream of a brighter future. When in reality it will only ensure more and more people giving what little money they make to attempt to move up a senseless and predatory economic ladder.

I refuse to consider our Master slightly loosening the harness on our backs as an end to Slavery.

This should only be more fuel for our fire.

Slaves of this system if there was ever a time to unite against the corrupt Establishment, now is it.

Occupy Everything.

Immortal Technique: ‘Occupy Wall Street’ does not support Obama

2011-10-23T21:16:00.002-04:00

"I keep telling people, everyone that I meet, that I think this is one of the best expressions of democracy that people have seen in America in the past few decades. Unlike the tea party, this is something that’s organic. It's not corporate funded. It’s not by the Koch brothers. This isn’t a reelection campaign for Obama. We're willing to put his second term on the alter of democracy and sacrifice it if we need to, to send a message to the rest of the world saying, 'If you promise us change, and then you deliver nothing but the same, if you do these little superficial changes to pacify the people, to placate people, then you expose yourself.'"

"[That's] unlike the tea party, which wasn’t necessarily a repudiation of Obama, but more an addressing of conservative values. Their first targets were conservatives, not Democrats. They wanted to restructure what they thought the Republican party was moving away from, which was social conservatism and the religious right, which they wanted a closer connection to. This is more of an organic, non-corporate, anti-corporate movement. This is something that's trying to address real issues in the streets."

- Immortal Technique

Occupy Ft. Lauderdale

2011-10-15T21:37:00.008-04:00

Protestors gathered in downtown Ft. Lauderdale on Saturday, October 15, 2011 in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement that has spread across the nation and the globe.

Click below to see some of the photos and video I captured:

GET MONEY OUT of Politics

2011-10-10T17:14:00.004-04:00

Bailouts. War. Unemployment. Our government is bought, and we’re angry. Now, we’re turning our anger into positive action. By signing this petition, you are joining our campaign to get money out of politics. Our politicians won’t do this. But we will. We will become an unrelenting, massive organized wave advocating a Constitutional amendment to get money out of politics.

As the petition grows, the wave grows. Email, Facebook, Tweet, Blog — GET MONEY OUT. We are using our ability to influence media outlets as a platform to force this issue to the center of the 2012 elections. Join us.

From former Washington Lobbyist, Jimmy Williams, here is a DRAFT of our Constitutional Amendment for public debate this fall:

"No person, corporation or business entity of any type, domestic or foreign, shall be allowed to contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office or to contribute money on behalf of or opposed to any type of campaign for Federal office. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, campaign contributions to candidates for Federal office shall not constitute speech of any kind as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution or any amendment to the U. S. Constitution. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office."

Here is Lawrence Lessig's DRAFT of the amendment. Feel free to share your comments for debate.

"No non-citizen shall contribute money, directly or indirectly, to any candidate for Federal office. United States citizens shall be free to contribute no more than the equivalent of $100 to any federal candidate during any election cycle. Notwithstanding the limits construed to be part of the First Amendment, Congress shall have the power to limit, but not ban, independent political expenditures, so long as such limits are content and viewpoint neutral. Congress shall set forth a federal holiday for the purposes of voting for candidates for Federal office."

To double your impact, send GetMoneyOut.com to one other person (or as many as you can..).

Learn more about this critical movement:

Lawrence Lessig's Ctrl+Alt+Del

Charlie Chaplin: Beyond Comedy

2011-10-08T15:31:00.005-04:00

"The Great Dictator" (1940)

"I'm sorry, but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone, if possible, Jew, gentile, black man, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness — not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another.

In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical. Our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in men, cries out for universal brotherhood, for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world — millions of despairing men, women and little children — victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say — do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed — the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes — men who despise you — enslave you — who regiment your lives — tell you what to do — what to think or what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men — machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts. You don't hate! Only the unloved hate — the unloved and the unnatural!

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the 17th Chapter of St. Luke it is written: "the Kingdom of God is within man" — not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people have the power — the power to create machines. The power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure.

Then, in the name of democracy, let us use that power! Let us all unite! Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth the future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power, but they lie! They do not fulfill their promise; they never will. Dictators free themselves, but they enslave the people! Now, let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world, to do away with national barriers, to do away with greed, with hate and intolerance. Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness.
Soldiers! In the name of democracy, let us all unite!"

Zeitgeist Response to Occupy Wall Street

2011-09-29T01:06:00.003-04:00

by The Zeitgeist Movement Global on Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 12:58am

www.occupywallst.org

On Sept 17th 2011, a grassroots expression of contempt was launched in the heart of the world's financial center in lower Manhattan of New York City, also commonly known to the world as the institution of "Wall Street". As of Sept 26th, there have been over 80 arrests and many recorded instances of what appears to be violence and abuse coming from the police and security forces there. However, the protesters remain vigilant in what could very well be a landmark event that will resonate for some time to come.

The Zeitgeist Movement would like to extend its public support to this basic expression.

As the world awakens to a failing financial system with growing civil unrest emerging without the bias of sovereignty, religion or political loyalty, a new, unifying perspective is slowly taking hold which
transcends the framework many of us falsely assume as empirical to our way of life.

With the slow grind down of the global workforce as machine automation continues to replace human labor for the benefit of corporate cost efficiency, simultaneously reducing purchasing power and hence inevitably stifling so called “Economic Growth”; with the ever expanding Debt Crisis born out of the Fractional Reserve Lending System and the simple reality that money is created out of debt and sold as a commodity in exchange for Interest - Interest that can only again come onto existence through more loan sales; with the looming military programs growing in virtually all major powers as the financial crisis, coupled with a pending hydrocarbon energy crisis, begins to suggest a stage of global conflict possibly never before seen; along with the market psychology of Infinite Growth Consumption that continues to pervade and distort our values and what it means to live in harmony with nature on a finite planet...

...it might be time we begin to see that the social problems at hand are not specific to any general policy, administration, or even so called "corporate greed". The real problem at hand is actually systematic via the very core foundation of what defines our Economic System and the psychology that is supported and rewarded.

The historical illusion that continues to this day is that someone or some group is explicitly to "blame". Rather than focus on the 400 people who have more wealth than 150 million in America or the fact that globally 1% of the world's population has more wealth than 40%, let's instead ask ourselves how such a manifestation is even possible and, more critically, why we would expect anything less? Think about it.

After all, it's the "Free-Market", isn't it? Contrary to the statistically void efficiency assumptions made by most Market Economists, the Free-Market simply means anyone can do whatever they want and maximize however they want within the confines of legal legislation; legal legislation which, make no mistake, is also for sale in the Free-Market as well; as are political officials, regulatory institutions and whatever social entity you wish to consider.

Nothing but maximizing monetary gain is sacred and anytime a person or group brings some detrimental social or environmental consequence of this system to the forefront, pejorative distinctions are usually branded upon their forehead to stifle such concern and frighten other detractors – such as being called a “Socialist” or “Communist”.

Furthermore, while people in protest today across the world continue to condemn monetary influence in social dealings such as the legal reality of Corporate Lobbying, even using such colorful terms as "Corporatism", “Crony-Capitalism” and even “Fascism”, they seem to misunderstand what this system is and always has been.

The Free-Market model of Economics is a haphazard, unscientific anarchy of organization which assumes that any person or group with enough money and hence power will be “responsible” in their actions both socially and environmentally. The problem is that the very definition of being "financially responsible” actually means to be socially and environmentally exploitative, manipulative and negligent, for the main driver of this system is Inefficiency. The more problems in society in general, the more jobs are created and the more rich the upper 1% become. There is an empirical decoupling from what actually supports life and no alteration of the core configuration of the monetary-market Incentive will likely change that.

On a different level, this system, as an historical evolution, is actually based on a culturally hegemonic pretense. Once economic advantage is obtained, it will likely be kept. This is why everything in the system favors the wealthy by its general structure and inherent logic. While the public might complain about the fact that top Hedge Fund Managers bring in over 300 million dollars per year, they often do not find objection with an Interest system that rewards those with high deposits and essentially taxes those using credit. While you may buy your home with a loan, paying thousands in interest a year, a person of wealth can make a CD Investment and gain free interest income simply because they have the money to spare.

Class separation and perpetuation and the growing wealth divide is not a byproduct. It is inevitable. In the Free-Market, one is actually “free” to take away the liberty of others through the mere economic pressures generated from the game. You are only as free as the size of your wallet. The term “Institution Racism” was coined by civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael in the 1960s referring to how often unnoticed underlying policies and structures within the social system undermined African-American prosperity and equality. What we have today is a mere variation: “Institutional Classicism”.

Wall Street itself, which is the ultimate manifestation of the pursuit of money as a commodity rather than any form of true creation or social contribution, is naturally a ripe entity for symbolic objection for, at a minimum, it shouldn't exist at all and most certainly not have the grand effect it does on the stability of the global economy today, regardless of the inherent shortcomings denoted.

However, that stated, it must again be made clear that Wall Street and the Banking System are not the source of our problems. They are only symptoms of an Economic System which will continue to fail by the very gravity of its outdated and false assumptions of human conduct and environmental relationships.

The question then becomes, what do we put in its place? ~Z

About:

The Zeitgeist Movement is a global sustainability activist group working to bring the world together for the common goal of species sustainability before it is too late. It is a social movement, not a political one, with over 1100 chapters across nearly all countries. Divisive notions such as nations, governments, races, political parties, religions, creeds or class are non-operational distinctions in the view of The Movement. Rather, we recognize the world as one system and the human species as a singular unit, sharing a common habitat. Our overarching intent could be summarized as “the application of the scientific method for social concern.”

To learn more about our work, please visit www.thezeitgeistmovement.com

Zooming Out in the 21st Century

2011-09-27T14:22:00.011-04:00

I choose neither party, nor do I watch mainstream television the way most people do. The Red and the Blue is a facade --- the real owners of this world merely provide the illusion of choice through senseless institutions and factions that put profit before people.

We are plagued by a culture of excessive consumption, hypocrisy, and greed -- highlighted best by our corrupt elected officials and their fake WWE-like public battles. Elected but paid for and sponsored by __________!

The MSM collectively only portrays just how absent meaningful substance or compassion American culture and its governance really has become. It demonstrates how easily the power of propaganda and religious-like ferment can convert naturally compassionate and loving beings into savage animals.

The MSM collectively shows our predicaments as unchangeable, 50/50 on every issue... But the lies clogging our airwaves cannot hide the real pain and suffering of the world. The noise from the constant flood of advertisements can't drown out the reality of a sweatshop worker in Morocco pumping out $200 pairs of jeans for chicken feed while we all prance around looking for a matching t-shirt made in Indonesia (but on sale for $49!!)

I can't bear the barrage of all the evidence of this facade, so instead I go online and try looking at America through the eyes of a Palestinian, or a child from the projects in one of our cities' ghettos who only get air time on the big screen when they are arrested for a crime that could have been avoided altogether had society not been so scared of one another.

I prefer to try seeing the world through the eyes of people praying for change --- and not petty change like lower taxes, or fairer drug laws -- or a parent praying for her child to win her softball game -- not praying for a better job, or bigger bank account -- but a change in their overall quality of life and ability to obtain the basic necessities of survival.

I use this blog, Twitter, and Facebook to share what I find but I know the Wall can hide history almost as good as an American high school. I read independent history and explore other cultures, like the underground London rap culture --- comprised of rappers (like Lowkey) who would never get a chance to get the coverage and exposure that our American con-artists get daily.

Turning America's negative soundboard off and going online is the only way to truly see the world through independent eyes. The truth isn't going to be found in a CNN or Fox report or soundbite, and especially not in the commercials they're drowned by. NBC and CBS definitely aren't going to show you just how much of a Disney Land shopping mall America has become... You have to actually step outside and get in line for one of the many rides. (If you can afford admission of course)

Find and follow independent journalism and activism. Think critically and don't just accept the propaganda and lies you're being spoon-fed daily -- telling you what to think, what to believe, what to buy.... Ask questions and find out the answers for yourself.

Zoom out.

Lowkey Made Me A Believer

2011-09-26T17:42:00.011-04:00

"I Believe" - Lowkey

I believe in equality, freedom & honesty
I believe that I'm a born leader so follow me
I believe in respecting others
I believe that sons should learn from their fathers and protect their mothers
I believe that you reap what you sow
And people won't believe if you don't speak what you know
I believe that dreams are sacred and I'm gonna be the greatest
But I'll leave this place before I'm fully appreciated
I believe in choosing your path but to improve in advance
You have to understand your roots and your past
The future is ours, there's room for our tunes in the charts
And we'll become superstars if my crew gets the chance
I believe life's a lesson, we're all students in class
I believe that MC's are confusing this art
There's lies on the telly but there's truth in my heart
Do you believe in yourself or I feel stupid to ask
'Cos I believe..

I believe my future's gonna bring me greater things yes I believe
I believe we can be anything, it aint impossible, its easy to achieve
Ain't nothing wrong you can chase your dreams
Make your moves and take the lead
I believe... we can do anything yes I believe

I believe I was placed on this earth for a specific reason
Numerous close shaves, but still I'm flipping breathing
And I believe all oppressed people should be given freedom
I believe you saw them kids starving, you just didn't feed 'em
I believe in love, I believe in peace, I believe in God
Somehow, some way; we're gonna beat the odds
I don't believe in black or white (no), only wrong or right
I believe there's other life forms up beyond the skies
I believe you can't judge a book by its cover
We're still brothers even if we don't look like each other
I believe it's up to you to find the life you'd like to live
I believe God guides my hand when I'm writing this
I got other purposes besides just rap
I believe I'll probably die before I relax
But if Muhammad Ali won his title back
Then I can change the world when I write a track
'Cos I believe

I believe my future's gonna bring me greater things yes I believe
I believe we can be anything, it aint impossible, its easy to achieve
Ain't nothing wrong you can chase your dreams
Make your moves and take the lead
I believe... we can do anything yes I believe

I believe in miracles
I believe the spirit goes to a peaceful place when you leave the physical
I'm privileged to have a opinion that people listen to
Hope this song can ease your mind if you're feeling miserable
I don't believe in fiction, facts make better movies
I cry freedom for Steve Biko and Fela Kuti
They can never move me even if they execute me
Listen to my words and every sentence 'cos I meant them truly
I believe that Marley, Marvin, Martin and Malcolm did
im an alchemist with this evil I've been surrounded with
How ever is Mount Everest standing on the mountains tip
not about to live on my knees with cuffs around my wrists
I believe it's essential I represent my peers
Please let go of your fears and your sentimental tears
If Mandela got free after 27 years
Then I can change the world with this record that you hear
'Cos I believe...

I believe my future's gonna bring me greater things yes I believe
I believe we can be anything, it aint impossible, its easy to achieve
Ain't nothing wrong you can chase your dreams
Make your moves and take the lead
I believe... we can do anything yes I believe

More Lowkey:

Obama Nation

Obama Nation Part 2

Amazon: Lowkey - Soundtrack to the Struggle

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

2011-08-26T12:12:00.005-04:00

By: Cornel West
Published: August 25, 2011
Source: The New York Times

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

Keith Olbermann: The Great Hypocrisies of the Debt Deal

2011-08-03T23:31:00.002-04:00

Hot Coffee

2011-07-16T15:15:00.004-04:00

A must see if you have HBO:

Concept of the Day: Crab Mentality

2011-06-04T17:49:00.005-04:00

So this is the first of a new series of posts dedicated to concepts that I think are noteworthy. Today's concept is:

Crab mentality - (Wikipedia) sometimes referred to as crabs in the bucket; a way of thinking best described by the phrase "if I can't have it, neither should you."

The metaphor refers to a pot of crabs. Individually, the crabs could easily escape from the pot, but instead, they grab at each other in a useless "king of the hill" competition (or sabotage) which prevents any from escaping and ensures their collective demise.

The analogy in human behavior is that of a group that will attempt to "pull down" (negate or diminish the importance of) any member who achieves success beyond the others, out of jealousy, conspiracy or competitive feelings.

This term is broadly associated with short-sighted, non-constructive thinking rather than a unified, long-term, constructive mentality. It is also often used colloquially in reference to individuals or communities attempting to "escape" a so-called "underprivileged life," but kept from doing so by others attempting to ride upon their coat-tails or those who simply resent their success.

Florida's Governor Signs Another Assault on Democracy Into Law

2011-05-21T11:30:00.017-04:00

This post is a remix of an original article posted by SemDem on Daily Kos

Jim Crow has returned to Florida!

St. Petersburg Times:

Not surprisingly, Gov. Rick Scott signed into law on Thursday pernicious election changes designed to benefit Republicans and suppress voting by minorities, college students and low-wage workers. It is a blatant partisan effort to make it harder to register to vote and cast ballots, and it is up to the U.S. Department of Justice and the courts to stand up to this assault on democracy.

By shortening early voting from two weeks to eight days, the new law makes it harder for low-income working people who don't have flexible hours to vote. And early voting is barred three days before Election Day, ensuring that the weekend before the election, when casual voters are most engaged and most able to vote, there will be no opportunity. Republicans took aim at Florida's popular early voting process because it has favored Democrats and was utilized by African-Americans in 2008 as Barack Obama won Florida and the presidency. The other form of early voting, absentee ballots, which heavily favors Republicans, was untouched by the new law.

In another craven move by Republicans, voters who change their residences a lot such as renters, college students and the poor will now to be handed provisional ballots at the polls, which may or may not be counted. For the last 40 years, Floridians who moved out of the county of their registration had the convenience of changing their address at the polls, and with the state's new voter database, there's no chance of someone voting twice. But the rules were tightened to disadvantage Democratic voters.

The new law also suppresses voting by threatening groups that conduct voter registration drives. Groups will now face steep fines if they don't get new registrations submitted within 48 hours rather than 10 days. They also must register with the state, listing all volunteers who will be registering voters. And those volunteers must individually swear to uphold election laws. The paperwork is designed to be an administrative nightmare for organizations that utilize hundreds of volunteers with few resources. No wonder the League of Women Voters says it will suspend its voter registration efforts in Florida because of the new law.

Republicans claim that the changes are necessary to address voter fraud. That's a laughable contention, dispelled by the Florida Department of State, which reports that only 31 cases were referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement for investigation between January 2008 and March 2011. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Florida. Besides, voting by absentee ballot is most the susceptible to fraud, since no one sees whether the named voter is the one who fills out his ballot. Yet Republicans had no interest in putting new safeguards on absentee voting.

It's no shock that Scott failed to stand up to Republican legislators and veto this assault on the constitutional right to vote. It is disappointing that Secretary of State Kurt Browning, the former Pasco elections supervisor once known for his integrity and independence, is sacrificing his own reputation to defend the indefensible for his new boss. Republican legislators have succeeded in their unrepentant effort to make it harder for their most likely political opponents to vote. The Justice Department and the courts should not let them get away with it.

Election supervisors, who run elections in Florida, have predicted chaos and confusion at the polls because of these changes, which the GOP has falsely said was an effort to stem voter "fraud."

Third-party voter registration groups such as the League of Women Voters, unions and the NAACP must turn in voter-registration cards within 48 hours or face steep fines, which groups have said would be difficult when they register thousands of new voters at a time.

Miami Herald:

The League of Women Voters says it will suspend voter-registration activity in Florida because the bill requires such groups to register with the state and face fines of up to $1,000 for mistakes.

In addition, this law cuts early voting in half. Why? The majority of Democratic voters in 2008 voted the first week of early voting. This new law makes it harder for low-income working people who don't have flexible hours to vote. The law even bars early-voting three days before election day... to ensure casual voters don't vote the weekend before Nov. 2!

(How that stems fraud is anyone's guess.)

This law goes to the heart of the Democratic base. It will force women, minorities, and college students from getting actual ballots. They will be forced to use shady Provisional ballots, the majority of which, according to PolitiFact, are not counted!

- Women can no longer update their names at the polls if they changed their marital status. They've been able to do this for almost half a century with NO issues. They will be forced to go provisional.

- College students will no longer be able to update their new address. Their votes will also be provisional... and unlikely to count

- Minorities should be worried as well:

There are many other new regulations, several depriving voters of their chance to work out problems at the polls. For instance, if voters are challenged for any reason, they would be required to cast a provisional ballot. And they could not receive legal help while in line, as before.

As SemDem reported previously, vote caging operations are a go for the GOP for 2012.

Other Recent Assaults:

ALL volunteers who just want to register voters must now register with the Supervisor of Elections. (Keep in mind Gov. Voldemort didn't want a database for pill mill doctors because it would violate the drug dealer's privacy... yet has no trouble using a database to intimidate voter registrators.)

The news media and bloggers are now restricted from taking video or audio of voters at polling places.

Citizen-led initiatives, the only challenge we have to the teabag legislature, are now requiring a ridiculous 600,000 signatures that must be collected in just 20 months--not four years.

There's much more, but you get the point. Gov. Scott said its all about preventing fraud. Except no one...not any of the elections supervisors, not the Secretary of State, can find any instance.

In addition, if this was REALLY about fraud, why go after early voters? The biggest chance of fraud is absentee ballots, but these were left alone. Why? Guess where the GOP gets a lot of votes from?

This is about voter suppression. One FL Teabag lawmaker already admitted it was about making voting as hard as possible.

Rick Scott has already passed an archaic rule requiring nonviolent felons to wait five years after completing their sentences before applying to have their voting rights restored. Even though he knows this will purge thousands of innocent (and disproportionately black) voters from the polls misidentified as felons.

Join the fight:

- Sign the Democratic Governors Association's Petition

- Sign the SignOn.org Petition to the Department of Justice and Attorney General

- Contact the Department of Justice. Some of our election laws are subject to review because of the Voting Rights Act. This is a clear case of disenfranchisement. --- Direct # for Dept. of Voting Rights at DOJ: (202) 307-2767

- Contact the Florida Democratic Party. Tell them to start acting like an opposition party by leading a citizen-led initiative to our Constitution to overturn this mess. And another one that there can be NO more changes to our election laws that restrict voting unless its put before the people!

- The Governor's office admitted they recently fielded a record number of calls, all of them opposed to this law. Obviously, he cares not what the citizens want. Drop him [and your legislator] a line and let them know what you think about voter suppression.)

- Spread the word! Since the Mainstream Media has obviously decided to ignore this it's important to reach out to anyone you can to raise awareness about the GOP's endless assault on democracy. Post what is happening here in Florida on your Facebook wall, or someone else's. Blog about it! Write your local paper. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your family about what is going on.

And tell any Floridian to make sure they are registered to vote or have updated their information at the Supervisor of Elections.

See Also:

Register to vote online here!

A Real Democracy Would Provide a Recall

Florida Governor Ensures MILLIONS Won't Vote! Where's the Outrage?

2011-05-21T10:50:00.010-04:00

This post is a remix of an original article posted by SemDem on Daily Kos

Jim Crow has returned to Florida!

St. Petersburg Times:

Not surprisingly, Gov. Rick Scott signed into law on Thursday pernicious election changes designed to benefit Republicans and suppress voting by minorities, college students and low-wage workers.

. . . .

It's no shock that Scott failed to stand up to Republican legislators and veto this assault on the constitutional right to vote. It is disappointing that Secretary of State Kurt Browning, the former Pasco elections supervisor once known for his integrity and independence, is sacrificing his own reputation to defend the indefensible for his new boss. Republican legislators have succeeded in their unrepentant effort to make it harder for their most likely political opponents to vote. The Justice Department and the courts should not let them get away with it.

The League of Women Voters says it will suspend voter-registration activity in Florida because the bill requires such groups to register with the state and face fines of up to $1,000 for mistakes.

Third-party voter registration groups such as the League of Women Voters, unions and the NAACP must turn in voter-registration cards within 48 hours or face HUGE fines, which groups have said would be difficult when they register thousands of new voters at a time.

In addition, this law cuts early voting in half. Why? The majority of Democratic voters in 2008 voted the first week of early voting. This new law makes it harder for low-income working people who don't have flexible hours to vote. The law even bars early-voting three days before election day... to ensure casual voters don't vote the weekend before Nov. 2!

(How that stems fraud is anyone's guess.)

This law goes to the heart of the Democratic base. It will force women, minorities, and college students from getting actual ballots. They will be forced to use shady Provisional ballots....according to PolitiFact, the majority of these ballots are not counted!

Women can no longer update their names at the polls if they changed their marital status. They've been able to do this for almost half a century with NO issues. They will be forced to go provisional.

College students will no longer be able to update their new address. Their votes will also be provisional... and unlikely to count

Minorities should be worried as well:

There are many other new regulations, several depriving voters of their chance to work out problems at the polls. For instance, if voters are challenged for any reason, they would be required to cast a provisional ballot. And they could not receive legal help while in line, as before.

As SemDem reported previously, vote caging operations are a go for the GOP for 2012.

Other nuggets of evil:

ALL volunteers who just want to register voters must now register with the Supervisor of Elections. (Keep in mind Gov. Voldemort didn't want a database for pill mill doctors because it would violate the drug dealer's privacy... yet has no trouble using a database to intimidate voter registrators.)

The news media and bloggers are now restricted from taking video or audio of voters at polling places.

Citizen-led initiatives... the only challenge we have to the teabag legislature.. are now requiring a ridiculous 600,000 signatures that must be collected in just 20 months--not four years.

There's more, but you get the point. Gov. Scott said its all about preventing fraud. Except no one...not any of the elections supervisors, not the Secretary of State, can find any instance. The Tampa article mentioned only 31 cases even investigated in the past several years.

In addition, if this was REALLY about fraud, why go after early voters? The biggest chance of fraud is ABSENTEE BALLOTS.. but these were left alone. WHY? Guess where the GOP gets a lot of votes from?

This is about voter suppression. One FL Teabag lawmaker even admitted it was about making voting as hard as possible.

Rick Scott has already passed an archaic rule requiring nonviolent felons to wait five years after completing their sentences before applying to have their voting rights restored. Even though HE KNOWS this will purge THOUSANDS of innocent (and disproportionately black) voters from the rolls misidentified as felons like we did in 2000.

Join the fight:

1. Contact the Department of Justice. Some of our election laws are subject to review because of the Voting Rights Act. This is a clear case of disenfranchisement. --- Direct # for Dept. of Voting Rights at DOJ: (202) 307-2767

2. Contact the Florida Democratic Party. Tell them to start acting like an opposition party by leading a citizen-led initiative to our Constitution to overturn this mess. And another one that there can be NO more changes to our election laws that restrict voting unless its put before the people!

3. The governor's office admitted they fielded a record number of calls... all of them opposed to this law. Obviously, he cares not what the citizens want. Drop him [and your legislator] a line and let them know what you think about voter suppression.)

4. Spread the message. Post what is happening here in Florida on your blog or post on someone else's. Write a LETTER to your paper. Talk to your neighbors, your friends, your family about what is going on. MAKE SOME NOISE... since the Mainstream Media has obviously decided to ignore this.

OH, and if the people you talk to are in Florida, tell them to make sure they are registered to vote or to update their information at the Supervisor of Elections NOW!

Register to vote online here!

See Also:

A Real Democracy Would Provide a Recall

Chomsky: Destroying the Facade

2011-05-16T20:38:00.005-04:00

Obama Nation

2011-05-10T17:36:00.007-04:00

This track is not an attack upon the American people
It’s an attack upon the system within which they live
Since 1945 the United States has attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments,
In the process the US has caused the end of life for several million people
And condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair

The strength of your dreaming prevents you from reason
The American dream only makes sense if you’re sleeping
It’s just a cruel fantasy; their politics took my voice away
But their music gave it back to me
The land where the lumpen are consumed by consumption
Killing themselves to shovel down food in abundance
I guess a rapper from Britain is a rare voice
America is capitalism on steroids
Natives kept in casinos and reservations
Displaced slaves never given reparations
Take everything from Native Americans
And wonder why i call it the racist experiment
Afraid of your melanin, the same as it’s ever been
That aint gonna change with the race of the president
I see imperialism under your skin tone
You could call it Christopher Columbus syndrome.

Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?

Doesn’t make any difference when they bomb your nation

Oh say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through perilous fight
For the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming

The world’s entertainer, the world’s devastator
From Venezuela, to Mesopotamia
Your cameras lie, cause they have to hide the savage crimes
Committed on leaders that happen to try and nationalize
Eating competitions while the worlds been starving
Beat up communism with the help of Bin Laden
Where would your war of terror be without that man
Every day you create more Nidal Hassans
Kill a man from the military, you’re a weirdo
But kill a wog from the Middle East you’re a hero
Your country is causing screams that never reach your ear holes
America inflicted a million Ground Zeros
Follow the dollar and swallow your humanity
Soldier’s committing savagery you never even have to see
Those mad at me, writing emails angrily
I’m not anti-America, America is anti-me

Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?
Is it Obama’s nation? Or an abomination?

Doesn’t make any difference when they bomb your nation

And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night, that our flag was still there
Oh say does that star spangled banner yet wave
For the land of the free and the home of the brave

I don’t care if him and Cheney are long lost relations
What matters more is the policies, I lost my patience
Stop debating bringing race into the conversation
Occupation and cooperation equals profit making
It’s over; people wake up from the dream now
Nobel peace prize, Jay Z on speed-dial
It’s the substance within, not the colour of your skin
Are you the puppeteer or the puppet on the string?
So many believed it was instantly gonna’ change
There was still Dennis Ross, Brzezinski and Robert Gates
What happened to Chas Freeman? (AIPAC)
What happened to Tristan Anderson?
It’s a machine that keeps that man breathing
I have the heart to say what all the other rappers aren’t
Words like Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan
The wars on, and you morons were all wrong
I call Obama a bomber cause those are your bombs

A Real Democracy Would Provide A Recall

2011-04-23T16:41:00.017-04:00

"We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob." - Franklin Roosevelt

After recently signing a petition to push for Recall legislation in Florida, I received this response from Rep. Rick Kriseman:

Dear fellow fed-up Floridian,

Thank you for signing our petition in support of my recall legislation. Being just one guy in the minority in the Florida Legislature, sometimes all I can do is start a conversation. Given the hyper partisanship in Tallahassee, the likelihood of any of my ideas being given at chance at becoming law, especially legislation allowing for recalls, is almost nil. But I do believe in the power of the citizenry, and in your ability to assist me and to also affect change on your own. This petition is proof of that. Regardless of whether our legislation lives or dies, the petition you signed allows me to keep you abreast of future developments related to recalls in Florida. Should a formidable citizen-led recall petition drive begin, I will notify you immediately on ways sign on and to help.

In the interim, please consider connecting with me on Facebook or Twitter, or sign up to receive future campaign updates by visiting my website.

Finally, here's a couple of things you can do right now. 1) Forward our petition to your friends via email or share on a social networking website. 2) Contact my colleagues and encourage them to co-sponsor and support our legislation, HJR 785 and HB 787.

Thank you again for your activism and passion for good government. I won't stop fighting for you.

Sincerely,
Rick Kriseman

With our electoral system beyond inept and corrupted by the interests of the few, some of us have been left wondering, if we can elect our officials, shouldn't we also be able to un-elect them just as easily?

Since American corporations want to run this country like a business, we should all treat it like one as well. And just like any big public corporation, its shareholders, the People, should have the right to vote to replace our executives.

Remember, even though it can be confusing since the biggest campaign contributors are the ones who help put our politicians onto the ballots and flood the airwaves with their misleading slogans, it is we the People who actually put them into office with our votes, to serve and protect OUR interests.

We are the joint owners of this corporate nation, and if we want good leaders we need a system where they can each be held directly accountable to the People, by the People --- and immediately --- not in the next election.

If we are ever going to Cntrl-Alt-Del this system, the Right to Recall is a necessary first step.

Floridians join the fight by signing the petition and contacting your local representatives to encourage them to support the Right to Recall.

For non Florida-residents, this issue is not just local in nature; it affects each and every aspect of our nation's alleged democracy.

We must all work together to raise awareness on a national scale to demand that the proper mechanisms and safeguards be put in place so that the People have more checks and balances on any elected representative who smooth talks their way into office and then disregards the needs of the majority of their constituents.

If we're ever going to see real change in the way our leaders and democracy operate, we need to evolve and re-design our archaic electoral systems to fit the growing complexities and demands of our 21st century civilization.

Spread the word.. A real democracy would provide a Right to Recall!

See also:

DAVID O. RUSSELL: FDR Said It All in 1936 -- Who Will Follow in His Steps Today?

Fair Elections Now: Fix Congress First

Make Them Pay

2011-04-18T23:13:00.005-04:00

The right wing is on the attack: slashing public services, eliminating workers' rights, and destroying jobs. Their excuse? "America is broke"—and yet big corporations and the wealthy are raking it in, and continue to get tax break after tax break. Something doesn't add up.

America is not broke. The right-wing wants to convince us we're broke so that they can push through their radical agenda. And well-connected corporations continue to use their political power to dodge their taxes. In 2009, after helping crash the American economy, Bank of America paid $0 in taxes. GE had a tax bill of $0 in 2010. Republicans want to give a $50 billion tax bailout to big oil companies—and at the same time take away food aid to hungry pregnant women and children.

This is immoral and un-American.

That's why today several concerned citizens gathered locally to protest irresponsible corporate welfare.

Join MoveOn.Org and get involved in a local chapter near you to help us raise awareness about the injustice and gross inequality we are all suffering at the hands of a corporate oligarchy in America.

George Carlin: Cynic or Prophet?

2011-04-14T01:32:00.013-04:00

"If you scratch a cynic, you'll find a disappointed idealist." - George Carlin (May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008)

The following are some compilations of debates and discussions with the late great comedian:

If there are any broken links above please notify me. Thanks.

See Also:

George Carlin and Bill Hicks Tell It Like It Is

Vanquishing the Middle Man

2011-04-13T13:35:00.005-04:00

Enlightening Renegade Economist Interviews:

Learn More:

The Renegade Economist YouTube Channel

Free Education: Banking 101

David Harvey: Crises of Capitalism

Getting to the Root of Our Problems

2011-04-09T13:41:00.003-04:00

As the World Wrestling Federation of Politics continues the only real winner of these fake title bouts are the elite puppet masters who write the scripts.

When will the majority of the American people realize that these people do not represent their interests?

Learn More:

Lawrence Lessig: Ctrl+Alt+Del

Lawrence Lessig @ Coffee Party Convention 2010

Jacque Fresco: Futurist, Visionary

2011-04-06T22:01:00.001-04:00

Could there be an alternative to our existence as good as Fresco proposes?

"In a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you're free" - Jacque Fresco

"Learning how to say I don't know is the most difficult thing." - Jacque Fresco

See Also:

Zeitgeist - Moving Forward

The Words I Never Said

2011-03-31T13:50:00.002-04:00

A great song you likely won't find played on the radio or television:

America is NOT Broke

2011-03-07T12:33:00.005-05:00

Michael Moore's speech at Wisconsin Capitol in Madison, March 5, 2011:

Read Moore's statement at HP

Republican War On Working Families

2011-03-02T10:29:00.002-05:00

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward

2011-02-18T22:11:00.008-05:00

Peter Joseph's amazing new documentary on several of life's most significant topics including human nature, global economics, rationality, and technology:

It sheds much light on the value system disorder that is rampant in our society...

Global Financial Crises Explained

2011-02-01T00:51:00.003-05:00

Satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe on the global financial crises:

See Also:

Free Education: Banking 101

Stewart Destroys Fox (Again)

2011-01-29T00:00:00.008-05:00

Rupert Murdoch's "fair and balanced" Fox commentators make it too easy for Jon Stewart of the Daily Show:

For more truth about the GOP and the Corporate King's 24/7 Propaganda Machine, see also:

OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

Exposing Fox News and The Tea Party For What They Really Are

Stewart Does Beck

You Can't Be Neutral On A Moving Train

2011-01-25T15:13:00.003-05:00

This full length documentary on the remarkable life and activism of Howard Zinn is available on Netflix.

See also:

Movie Night

Free Education

The Coming Revolt Of The Guard

Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power

2011-01-19T18:32:00.019-05:00

If you haven't discovered famous trial lawyer Gerry Spence or his work, do your mind a favor and free it by grabbing a copy of Bloodthirsty Bitches and Pious Pimps of Power: The Rise and Risks of the New Conservative Hate Culture.

Here's a sample:

Today our ideas of success are fame, power, and money. Most Americans have none and can hope to have none. Parents who rear their children to become useful citizens are not deemed as successful as the wealthy business brute who has wrestled a fortune off the backs of these parents. How a person has grown and bloomed is not as important as how much money one has made, even though the original self may have become shrunken and shriveled. Politicians and the wastrel heirs of some patriarchal fortune are marketed by their publicists in the same way that cars, beer, and shampoo are sold. The average American is left out.

After black slavery, the worker, black and white, became the new slave who was left to fend for himself, to feed and educate his children, and to see to his own burial. At the beginning of the Industrial Age the workingman was transformed into another commodity, an item of energy that could be converted to money.

Nothing has changed.

The worker is told that he is free, but...he is not, and he joins a television church or becomes a fanatic fan of a sports team. His anger is sometimes expressed in random violence and is recorded in the acceleration of the crime rate. His need for alcohol and drugs and at last an escape into the "plug-in-drug" television has become endemic to the country. Indeed, we've entered the new Prozac Age.

From what I've observed, most people take their anger as a part of their personality—like one accepts one's total body makeup without considering its parts. On the other hand, talk to the guy who's given his life to a corporate employer, a guy who's been dumped just before his pension accrues, and he can't find a lawyer to take his case, can't get into court, can't be heard, and we can see why he joins the likes of Nancy Grace in saying that lawyers are a bunch of pigs and the Constitution is a political ball batted around between politicians. He knows from his own experience that justice does not exist for him, and that all this leftist noise about freedom and rights is part of the great American myth. Sadly, he's right. Dead-on.

Talk to the woman who can't get her deserting husband to pay child support and who can't get a job because her skills have been outsourced to somebody making twenty-three cents an hour in New Delhi and we'll begin to understand something about anger. Talk to the mother who's lost her children to her drunken husband, who could buy a better lawyer, one who just happens to be friendly with the judge. People feel helpless. Lost. Forgotten. Unimportant. And you begin to understand how, when Ms. Coulter says that women should never stray from the home, it angers a woman who is worrying herself sick about how she's going to take care of her kids and keep the bank from foreclosing on her little house.

This generalized hate often has a narrow base. It's easy to hate gays if one can't find a job that pays more than minimum starvation wage. It's easy to jump on the patriotic bandwagon to blow the hell out of half the innocent people in Iraq if one has, in effect, been blown to some sort of economic hell and is equally innocent. When people feel hurt they hurt back.

I'm talking about something we all know. We just don't bring it up. We don't talk about ourselves, our feelings, or our sense of being excluded. Anyway, who would understand? Besides, to talk about it is to confess a sort of failure. Instead we talk about Jackson and Peterson cases and the current hillish hurricanes because we can deal with those more comfortably than with the storm from within.

Seriously, I haven't highlighted a book like this since law school...

I've compiled some great Spence quotes on my Facebook info page, but I figured I'd share some here as well since not all of you have friended me yet; which by all means I welcome! (Seriously, I'm trying to collect the whole set, however many millions it is.) And I don't discriminate on the basis of physical or mental trait! (except for haters of course).

Anyways, here they are:

"Money is like salt. A little of it lends flavor to the food of life. Too much of it destroys the pudding and a ton of it turns the kitchen into a salt mine."

"When any system has for its goal the advancement of the system over the betterment of its individual members, such a system is embedded in slavery."

"Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored."

"The people of a nation are enslaved when, together, they are helpless to institute effective change, when the people serve the government more than the government serves them."

"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief."

"My intent is to tell the truth as I know it, realzing that what is true for me may be blasphemy for others."

I'd quote most of what he says if I had the time. In fact, I was so compelled by his words that I ordered a copies of his books and gave them to as many people as I could afford this past holiday season! I'd buy one for everyone if I could, seriously..

In every Spence book that I've read (which include How to Argue and Win Everytime, Give Me Liberty!, and Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom) he uses his lifetime of experience, much of which was defending the little guy against the tyranny of government and industry, to deliver amazing closing arguments to his readers on every single issue critical to our lives and well-being.

His work should be required reading in every school in this nation.

Real Must See TV

2011-01-18T20:48:00.010-05:00

I've added the following films to my Movie Night and Free Education pages:

Grass: The History of Marijuana

Noam Chomsky on the World

The End of America (Based on book by Naomi Wolf)

WAL-MART: The High Cost of Low Price

OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

I also highly recommend if you have NetFlix you see some films that aren't available for free online:

Restrepo

South of the Border

Stay tuned.

Think We're Making Progress in Afghanistan?

2011-01-16T16:16:00.006-05:00

Think again.

Watch the full length documentary on Netflix.

See Also:

Rethink Afghanistan

Juice Media Rap News CableGate

2010-12-27T14:03:00.002-05:00

Supercuts!

2010-12-22T23:10:00.003-05:00

What do you think?
	Debt has imprisoned the world and its people.
	Money is a form of slavery.
	Without money the world would end.
	But I worked so hard for all my money!
	Socialist! Communist! Terrorist!
	We need to end the monetary system.
	We need a resource-based global economy.

pollcode.com free polls