The Daily Show's Jon Stewart takes Sen. Dianne Feinstein to task for her hypocrisy over the latest revelations that the CIA was spying on members of congress and their staff.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
Friday, March 07, 2014
Third World Health Care - Knoxville, Tennessee Edition
Aasif Mandvi visits an impoverished, underdeveloped locale with shocking health care conditions.
Big Vladdy - Semi-Delusional Autocrats
Conservative pundits are won over by Vladimir Putin's shirtless, horseback-riding antics.
Sunday, March 02, 2014
Essay: Anatomy of The Deep State | Bill Moyers
MIKE LOFGREN | 21 Feb 2014
billmoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
-snip-
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
READ IT ALL:
billmoyers.com
There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.
During the last five years, the news media has been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: In the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.
-snip-
Despite this apparent impotence, President Obama can liquidate American citizens without due processes, detain prisoners indefinitely without charge, conduct dragnet surveillance on the American people without judicial warrant and engage in unprecedented — at least since the McCarthy era — witch hunts against federal employees (the so-called “Insider Threat Program”). Within the United States, this power is characterized by massive displays of intimidating force by militarized federal, state and local law enforcement. Abroad, President Obama can start wars at will and engage in virtually any other activity whatsoever without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, such as arranging the forced landing of a plane carrying a sovereign head of state over foreign territory. Despite the habitual cant of congressional Republicans about executive overreach by Obama, the would-be dictator, we have until recently heard very little from them about these actions — with the minor exception of comments from gadfly Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Democrats, save a few mavericks such as Ron Wyden of Oregon, are not unduly troubled, either — even to the extent of permitting seemingly perjured congressional testimony under oath by executive branch officials on the subject of illegal surveillance.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
85 Billionaires and the Better Half
Michael Parenti | Common Dreams
18 Feb 2014
The world's 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world's population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
READ IT ALL:
18 Feb 2014
The world's 85 richest individuals possess as much wealth as the 3.5 billion souls who compose the poorer half of the world's population, or so it was announced in a report by Oxfam International. The assertion sounds implausible to me. I think the 85 richest individuals, who together are worth many hundreds of billions of dollars, must have far more wealth than the poorest half of our global population.
How could these two cohorts, the 85 richest and 3.5 billion poorest, have the same amount of wealth? The great majority of the 3.5 billion have no net wealth at all. Hundreds of millions of them have jobs that hardly pay enough to feed their families. Millions of them rely on supplements from private charity and public assistance when they can. Hundreds of millions are undernourished, suffer food insecurity, or go hungry each month, including many among the very poorest in the United States.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, February 05, 2014
Jon Stewart rips Fox News for endless scandal mongeriing
4 Feb 2014 | The Daily Show's Jon Stewart once again gives the haters over at Faux "news" the treatment they deserve.
SOURCE
SOURCE
Saturday, February 01, 2014
Bully Nation
1 February 2014
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber, Truthout | Op-Ed
Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign "yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices continue today. Corporations warn entire communities they will shut down factories and undermine the local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.
READ IT ALL:
Yale Magrass and Charles Derber, Truthout | Op-Ed
Bullying is the means through which the corporate empires were built. Carnegie and Rockefeller intimidated and threatened their rival capitalists to cede them an ever-larger share of the market. They brought in Pinkerton goons to beat striking workers into submission. Workers were forced to either sign "yellow dog" contracts and pledge not to join unions, or be thrown into the street. Similar bullying practices continue today. Corporations warn entire communities they will shut down factories and undermine the local economy if they do not accept low wages and minimal regulations. Banks entice consumers to borrow through predatory loans and then raise interest rates and threaten foreclosure. The corporations are clear they have the power and will not tolerate challenges from weaklings who fail to know their place.
READ IT ALL:
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
Thursday, January 23, 2014
TYT: Senator Bernie Sanders attacks Walmart
18 Jan 2014 - The Young Turks
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demanded that a panel of experts justify why America’s shrinking middle class should continue to subsidize the nation’s wealthiest family in a heated exchange Thursday during a congressional panel.”
“Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) demanded that a panel of experts justify why America’s shrinking middle class should continue to subsidize the nation’s wealthiest family in a heated exchange Thursday during a congressional panel.”
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
The Volokh Conspiracy and Washington Post's move to the right
JUSTIN BERRIER | MediaMatters.org
22 Jan 2014
The announcement that The Washington Post is partnering with and hosting the conservative and libertarian-leaning blog The Volokh Conspiracy is evidence that the Post may be moving to the right in the wake of the paper's acquisition by Jeff Bezos.READ IT HERE:
Sunday, January 19, 2014
The nation sleeps a dreamless sleep | Daily Kos
14 Jan 2014
In the end, the American Dream did not last very long. The modern version, the version with the two point five kids and the house in the suburbs, a nice modest house with a good lawn and a white picket fence (it was always a white picket fence, for some reason, white pickets being the go-to designator of middle class status) had its heyday in the post-war 1950s, and had suffered serious blows when the designated underclasses made themselves too visible in the 1960s, and survived the too-vapid 1970s and wealth-obsessed 1980s in tattered form, but by the 1990s the whole thing was looking a bit sketchy, and by the turn of the millennium it was dodgy, and before the next 10 years were out you were looked at as a bit of a rube if you still believed in it at all.
READ IT ALL:
In the end, the American Dream did not last very long. The modern version, the version with the two point five kids and the house in the suburbs, a nice modest house with a good lawn and a white picket fence (it was always a white picket fence, for some reason, white pickets being the go-to designator of middle class status) had its heyday in the post-war 1950s, and had suffered serious blows when the designated underclasses made themselves too visible in the 1960s, and survived the too-vapid 1970s and wealth-obsessed 1980s in tattered form, but by the 1990s the whole thing was looking a bit sketchy, and by the turn of the millennium it was dodgy, and before the next 10 years were out you were looked at as a bit of a rube if you still believed in it at all.
READ IT ALL:
The problem with Facebook
"Facebook is a complex ecosystem of individuals, creators, brands and advertisers, but I don't think it serves any of these groups particularly well because its top priority is to make money. Now, I don't think making money is a bad thing, in fact I hope to make some myself. The problem is the only way Facebook has found to make money is by treating all entities on the site as advertisers and charging them to share their content".
Friday, January 17, 2014
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
It was the year America stood up... and split apart: 1964 | American Experience | PBS
1964 was the year the Beatles came to America, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. It was the year when Berkeley students rose up in protest, African Americans fought back against injustice in Harlem, and Barry Goldwater’s conservative revolution took over the Republican Party. In myriad ways, 1964 was the year when Americans faced choices: between the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson or Barry Goldwater’s grassroots conservatism, between support or opposition to the civil rights movement, between an embrace of the emerging counterculture or a defense of traditional values.
Saturday, January 04, 2014
Rachel Maddow scorches Koch brothers on ‘correction’ demand
Rachel Maddow: "[W]e occasionally find people who have been mentioned in our coverage who are absolutely outraged that they have been mentioned in our coverage".
Saturday, December 28, 2013
Thomas Cahill on the People’s Pope | Bill Moyers
December 27, 2013
In just a few months, Pope Francis has proven to be one of the most outspoken pontiffs in recent history, especially when it comes to poverty and income inequality. In a message to be sent to world leaders marking the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace on January 1, he criticized the “widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs.”
Thomas Cahill on the People's Pope from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
In just a few months, Pope Francis has proven to be one of the most outspoken pontiffs in recent history, especially when it comes to poverty and income inequality. In a message to be sent to world leaders marking the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Peace on January 1, he criticized the “widening gap between those who have more and those who must be content with the crumbs.”
Thomas Cahill on the People's Pope from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.
Sunday, December 15, 2013
The Pathology of the Rich - Chris Hedges
On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Chris Hedges discusses the psychology of the super rich; their sense of entitlement, the dehumanization of workers, and mistaken belief that their wealth will insulate them from the coming storms.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
David Simon: Some people are more equal than others
There are two Americas. In one, bankers get golden parachutes, insider traders return to society as well-paid consultants, and influence is for sale. In the other, opportunity is scarce and forgiveness scarcer, jail awaits those caught possessing recreational drugs, and cries for help are ignored. Society preaches forgiveness for the rich and retribution for the poor. Entrenched inequality and its companion, poverty, are the dark side of the American dream for a citizenry united by name, but not by rules.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)